Connecting Cumbria UK Adding 2,000 FTTP Premises to Rollout

The state aid supported Connecting Cumbria project, which has so far made “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services available to around 93% of premises in the county (125,000 extra homes and businesses), is being extended to add a further 2,000+ premises via Openreach’s Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network.

At this point we should point out that Phase 2 of Connecting Cumbria was originally aiming to extend the availability of superfast broadband to 95% of premises across the county by mid-2018, which at 93% today means they’re running a fair bit behind schedule. The extra 2,000 premises might however be enough to inch them toward the original 95% target.

Most of the original build used Openreach’s slower FTTC technology but it’s understood that this latest extension will focus on FTTP, which is in keeping with the UK Government’s “full fibre” strategy. Otherwise the work is expected to take place over the next 12 months or so (guesstimating summer 2020 completion or later) and this will be funded by efficiencies (savings) made during earlier phases of work.

Jonathan Harris, Programme Manager for Connecting Cumbria, said:

“The importance of having faster, more reliable Internet access – wherever you are – cannot be underestimated. It’s vital for our businesses to be able to compete and for our communities to thrive.

In a geography like Cumbria rolling out faster broadband is no mean feat but by using the latest FTTP technology we can reach more premises and begin to fill in gaps in coverage. There is more to do but the roll-out continues and we are determined to make faster broadband available to as many homes and businesses as possible.”

Robert Thorburn, Openreach Partnership Director, said:

“We’ve already done a huge amount of great work across Cumbria both commercially and in partnership with Cumbria County Council, but we don’t intend to stop here.

This latest phase of work will help us make fast and reliable broadband available to more, very rural parts of the county, which will make a huge difference to the lives of people living and working there.

None of this would be possible without our engineering workforce. And It’s great that in the past 15 months around 80 people from Cumbria have decided to come and work for us – the country’s largest team of telecoms experts working to expand, upgrade, maintain and install services over our network.”

Sadly no details were provided about the rollout plan itself.