Openreach Broadband Delays Criticised by Dorset UK Council UPDATE

The deputy leader of Dorset Council, Peter Wharf, this week told a cabinet meeting that he was “now going to be not so nice” to Openreach (BT), which occurred after one of their managers allegedly told the local authority that their current roll-out of “superfast broadband” (FTTC/P) was a “shambles.“

At present the state aid supported Superfast Dorset (SFD) project has already worked with Openreach (BT) to extend the reach of FTTC and some FTTP based “superfast broadband” to cover 97.3% of the county, but confusingly some recent council documents say “95.1% of premises in the Dorset Council area have access to superfast broadband [and] 3.1% have access to full fibre” (either the 97% figure is using the older definition of 24Mbps+ or they’ve excluded Poole and Bournemouth from the 95% figure – it’s never clear).

Otherwise the current aim of the SFD project is to get “as close as practicably possible” to superfast broadband coverage (at speeds of 30Mbps+) by the end of 2020, while most of the on-going work involves deployments of gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology. Nevertheless a report in Bridport News suggests that the council are far from happy with Openreach’s progress, despite SFD appearing to be reasonably on-track.

Cllr Wharf (no relation to Worf from TNG) highlighted a number of problems with Openreach delays and poor performance. On top of that he said that a “senior executive” from the operator had originally pledged to attend all meetings with the council, although so far the unnamed individual had yet to attend a single one. “I have gone past the stage of being nice,” said the councillor.

A Spokesperson for Openreach said:

“No company is investing more into Dorset’s broadband infrastructure than Openreach. We accept that the current phase of the Superfast Dorset programme was slow to start due to contractual difficulties with suppliers, but we’re on track to reach every property in the current phase by this summer.

We’ve been discussing further changes to our contract with Dorset Council since September 2019 and, once agreed, we’ll be able to build even more full fibre broadband across Dorset. At least two members of our senior management team have been at every meeting with the council to ensure progress on key issues is made.

We look forward to continuing to bring our world-class infrastructure to the homes and businesses of Dorset.”

Interestingly Openreach suggested that, out of the “95% of Dorset” that can order “superfast broadband” today, “almost 93%” had been “built by Openreach“. We think this may be ignoring the impact of Virgin Media’s ultrafast broadband network across urban areas like Poole and Bournemouth.

Otherwise the operator is currently extending FTTP into parts of Beaminster, Gillingham, Shaftesbury, Motcombe and Verwood. We expect details on a new contract for further roll-out to be revealed in the not too distant future.

UPDATE 2:42pm

The original newspaper article doesn’t clarify, but we think the concerns about delay might not specifically relate to SFD as we can’t see much in the way of an issue with progress on the existing contracts. We think that the problems may instead relate to the Dorset/Openreach Local Body Partnership scheme (LBP). This is a variant of co-funded Community Fibre Partnerships (CFP), where the council put some funding into the CFP too (some of these are known to have been delayed for various reasons).