Benacre Estate in Suffolk Helps Self Dig Openreach FTTP Broadband

Residents living on the country Benacre Estate in Suffolk (England), which spans about 7,700 acres and includes nearly 100 homes, can now access Openreach’s (BT) Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network after local farmers mucked in to help the build.

Initially the cost of deploying FTTP across the sparse rural area would have been far too expensive (sadly no figures are given) for a commercial operator like Openreach to do itself or for the local community to afford. However the team at Benacre identified that they could make a significant cost saving by choosing to self-dig around 5km of their own network trenches.

After that the estate’s team engaged with local farmers, Openreach and the Better Broadband for Suffolk (BBS) project in order to agree a way forward. Clearly a mutually beneficial solution was found because the network is now in the process of going live.

Edward Vere Nicoll, Local Landowner, said:

“We found that we were struggling to rent out some of our properties, because the first question that most people asked was about the broadband speed. At that time, we didn’t have fibre and it was proving to be a major obstacle. I got in touch with Openreach to find out more and we quickly identified three self-dig opportunities at Benacre, around 5km in total, which would make a huge difference.

We worked really closely with local farmers to get the new infrastructure in place, including pulling armoured cable through underground ducting. You do have to be careful on farmland, but with these modern machines capable of creating a trench just a couple of feet wide, we’re able to go down to a sufficient depth around the edge of fields to make sure it’s out of harms way and not accidentally damaged in the future.

It’s fantastic that we’ve been able to bring some of the fastest broadband speeds available to this remote part of Suffolk. We used to get low single figure download speeds, but now we’re comfortably over 300 Mbps. Faster broadband is critical to the long-term prosperity of rural communities, with an ever-increasing reliance of broadband for home and work use. Self-dig is a great option for those in a position to do so.”

Until fairly recently we didn’t tend to see Openreach engaging in community self-dig projects, although gradually we are starting to spot more and more of these as the rollout of existing Building Digital UK based projects reaches into increasingly remote rural areas where even the public subsidy model can become strained (another example here and here).