Government Encouraging Openreach to Fibre Up UK Doctors

The UK Government’s Health Secretary, Matt Hancock MP, has said that he believes “every single GP” should have access to a “full fibre” (e.g. FTTP) broadband connection and he wants Openreach (BT) to do the heavy lifting, albeit with the help of their Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme (GBVS).

According to the report on Pulse, Hancock informed the attendants of a Conservative Party Conference fringe event last week that he had “bumped” into Openreach’s CEO (Clive Selley) and said, “I’ve got thousands of GP practices that need your full fibre connectivity.” In response the MP claims that Selley replied, “Send me their addresses.”

The aforementioned article puts a positive spin on all this, although we’d urge caution since so far as we can tell nobody has actually made a solid commitment to do anything. Instead Hancock appears to be encouraging Doctors to harness the GBVS, which is funded by a pot of £67m and aims to provide vouchers worth up to £3000 to help businesses with the costs of connecting to “full fibre” network (here).

A Spokesperson for Openreach said:

“We are keen to work with the health secretary on delivering future proof broadband infrastructure to GP surgeries across the UK.

We believe our network can do even more for patients and healthcare professionals, and we’re talking to all parts of government about how to encourage greater investment in full fibre broadband.”

On top of that it’s worth remembering that Openreach aren’t the only fibre optic builder in town and there will be other areas where different networks (e.g. those provided by Cityfibre, Virgin Media or others) may be better suited due to having connectivity at a closer proximity (every area and surgery will be different). But in some areas the costs may still be too high to roll-out such connections without extra support, even with a voucher.