Project Brings FTTP Broadband to New Homes in Whitehill and Bordon

The Whitehill & Bordon regeneration project, which is a joint venture between the Dorchester Group and UK house builder Taylor Wimpey, is working to ensure that thousands of new build homes in the area will be able to access a Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTH) broadband service from the day they move in.

The town of Bordon and nearby village of Whitehill are currently in the process of undergoing some major regeneration work, which among other things will see the local community in Hampshire being expanded from 14,000 to 23,000 people (here) through new housing, a new town centre and construction of a relief road.

The project is also working with network provider Electronic Media Services (EMS) in order to ensure that all residents and businesses are able to benefit from access to an ultrafast “full fibre” service from day one. The developer owns the duct, while EMS are deploying and maintaining the fibre and running the active layer. Local street furniture is also being ducted to help support future 4G and 5G mobile networks (small cells).

According to Justin Leese, Programme Director for the Government’s on-going Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) project, new residents will find their Gigabit connection is live from the moment they move in (first month of service is free). “The intention is that this will be an open access service and residents will then be able to select from a list of participating ISP’s. The fibre runs back to a meet-me point for co-location of ISP’s,” said Justin.

All of this appears to be in keeping with the growing deployment of FTTP broadband technology into new build homes by lots of different developers and ISPs (here and here). Future Government changes will seek to boost this by mandating Gigabit connections for new build homes and making it easier for network operators to access buildings where landlords fail to respond (details in our Budget 2018 news).

At the time of writing we couldn’t find any details of related packages or which ISP(s) will be distributing the new service, but we hope to have those soon (we’ve asked EMS). In the meantime Justin has shared a picture of the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) that is located under the stairs in one of Taylor Wimpey’s newly built homes, with a patch panel presenting Cat5e cabling to multiple rooms within the house (not sure why they didn’t use more modern cable than Cat5e). All pre-cabled.