BT Scoops Plymouth and South West Devon Full Fibre Contract

The Plymouth City Council (PCC) has announced that BT have been awarded the contract to install a new gigabit-capable “fibre broadband” network across Plymouth, South Hams and West Devon, which will use £2.2m of public funding to help connect 131 public sector sites (e.g. hospitals, schools, libraries and council buildings).

As part of this announcement BT has revealed that they’ve committed “significant inward investment to the region’s communications network” worth over £22 million over the next few years, although it’s unclear whether or not they’re including Openreach’s existing commercial FTTP and FTTC broadband roll-out plans into that figure.

Otherwise building work on the new full fibre network is expected to commence during the autumn 2020 period and will continue into 2021. The management and oversight of this installation will be carried out by Delt Shared Services on behalf of the partnership.

Tudor Evans OBE, Plymouth City Council Leader, said:

“The lockdown illustrates exactly why we need to make sure our technology and our networks are up to the job – not just now but in the future.

We’ve all had a wakeup call for how important our broadband network is – just on a personal basis let alone on a business continuity side – so I am chuffed to bits that this is going ahead. The possibilities are limitless.”

Samantha Toombs, BT’s Director of Public Sector (South West), said:

“As a major employer in the area, we’re really pleased to be working with partners in Plymouth and South West Devon on this new ultrafast broadband network. Using the latest broadband and our 5G mobile network will help critical public services run more efficiently and offer new, innovative solutions. It will also benefit council staff and healthcare providers, helping them improve the services being provided to residents and patients here. That means improving the economy and the lives of people living in and visiting this area.”

One curiosity in all this is that PPC made a similar announcement one year ago (here), although at the time they claimed to have secured £3m of funding from the UK government’s Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) project and intended to connect 227 public sector sites. We assume this is that same contract, albeit significantly scaled-back (we are currently seeking some clarification on this).

At present the city of Plymouth (where most of this work will take place) still gets the bulk of their gigabit-capable connectivity from Virgin Media’s hybrid fibre coax based cable network (covers most of the city). Sadly only a tiny bit of FTTP from Openreach exists today.