Suffolk UK Set to Approve Phase 3 Superfast Broadband Rollout UPDATE

The Suffolk County Council (SCC) appear set to appointed a supplier for their new £10m+ state aid fuelled Phase 3 Superfast Broadband contract, which could see 7,000 additional premises (mostly in rural areas) being reached by faster UK ISP networks; most likely via “gigabit-capable” Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology.

At present the existing £64m state aid supported Better Broadband for Suffolk (BBS) project with Openreach (BT), which is based off the Building Digital UK framework, has already put “superfast” speeds of 24Mbps+ within reach of 96% of homes and businesses within the county. The existing contracts should take this to 98% of local premises by the end of 2020.

The procurement process for their follow-on Phase 3 contract (aimed at the final 2% of premises) began last year (here) and a final decision on the outcome of that is now due to be made by the end of this month (a meeting will be held to discuss all this on 14th Jan 2020). We’d probably put money on an operator like Openreach or Airband being chosen as the supplier(s).

In terms of funding, the document for the aforementioned meeting only mentions £10m of gainshare (clawback) funding from BT, which is effectively a reinvestment of previous public funding that was put toward the earlier contracts (i.e. public money gets returned as take-up in related areas rises so as to improve coverage). But we also know that DEFRA funding of £1.725m will be included and a previous update put the total Phase 3 pot at nearly £15m.

The contract signature would then be followed by detailed technical and civil engineering survey and planning work, before commencing deployment of broadband infrastructure in the second half of 2020, continuing through 2021 and completing in 2022 “as soon as possible.” As usual a full rollout plan will be available after survey work is completed.

Interestingly it’s noted that in addition to the £10m from gainshare, a further £10m from DCMS / BDUK also exists, although apparently the Government “are not willing to commit the DCMS share of the Suffolk “gainshare” to re-invest in further coverage under Suffolk Phase 3” (i.e. maybe for a future Phase 4?).

However this was set before Boris Johnson’s (PM) new £5bn gigabit rollout was announced and so SCC have given themselves some wriggle room, which means that if the policy did change then they could still add the extra £10m to their Phase 3 as an extension.

In theory Phase 3 could push local coverage of superfast broadband to nearly universal levels. Oddly though Suffolk’s document still defines “superfast” as 24Mbps+, although all new contracts generally use the 30Mbps+ definition in order to align with the EU/Ofcom etc.

UPDATE 16th Jan 2020

As expected the council has approved their Phase 3 plan.