Openreach Updates on Rural FTTP Pilot Progress in Okehampton

Last autumn Openreach (BT) revealed that the West Devon (England) town of Okehampton would be among 13 other rural locations to help pilot a “range of new tools and techniques” for deploying their 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network (here). Fast forward to today and the work is almost completed.

The pilots were designed to test a number of innovations, such as remote FTTP nodes (Mini OLT) in street cabinets, the ditch witch cutter (pictured), micro ducting, ground penetrating radar, diamond cutters (trench digging), mobile planning (Orion) and a GeoRipper (used for digging trenches across soft ground at pace) etc. All together these improvements could help to speed up the roll-out and cut deployment costs.

Since then the operator has expanded their rural roll-out plan to include several hundred additional villages and towns in harder to reach areas (here, here and here). Assuming all goes to plan then some 3.2 million premises under their commercial deployment are expected to be in rural locations by 2025/26.

The town of Okehampton was one of the first to pilot these new innovations and, despite only being announced last October 2019, Openreach has already extended their local FTTP network to cover 3,000 premises in the area. At present the build is about 75% completed and there’s another 1,000 or so properties left to reach.

Connie Dixon, Openreach’s Regional (South West) Partnership Director, said:

“We’re making great progress here in Okehampton, and our Full Fibre build has continued despite the obvious challenges. As well as keeping people connected using our existing network, our engineers have continued building the new infrastructure to make sure that as lockdown restrictions ease, we can support families, businesses and the economic recovery.

I’d encourage everyone who can to upgrade to the new technology and take advantage of the many benefits. Full Fibre is more reliable and more resilient, meaning fewer faults and more predictable, consistent speeds. It’s also ‘future-proof’ as we expect it to easily meet the growing data demands of future technologies for decades to come. Use the fibre checker on our website to check your postcode to see if Full Fibre is available.”

Mind you it should be said that Okehampton, while challenging, is a lot easier to do today because it was one of the areas where Openreach were able to deploy “superfast broadband” (hybrid fibre FTTC / VDSL2) via state aid support under the original Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) contract in 2014 (here). Other locations, such as those where only ADSL or very slow FTTC still exists, will be harder.

The other 12 villages and towns named in that original pilot (covering 50,000 premises in total) were Cranfield; West Calder; Flockton; Hesketh Bank; Kentford; Lingfield; Lundin Links; Mickle Trafford; Ottery St Mary; Parbold; Seal and Tarporley. Many of those are also nearing completion of Openreach’s FTTP pilot roll-out.