Openreach Brings FTTP to More South Gloucestershire Villages
The South Gloucestershire Council in England has announced that Phase 3B of their state aid supported deployment of gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP technology, which is being delivered via Openreach (BT), is in the process of reaching a number of additional rural communities.
So far the related Connecting South Gloucestershire project, which follows the Building Digital UK framework, has already helped to extend “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) coverage to over 96% of local premises (i.e. 22,000 extra properties), which includes over 4,300 premises that have also been covered using gigabit-capable FTTP (“full fibre“) technology.
By comparison today’s announcement is expected to “take superfast broadband coverage from 96 per cent to 99 per cent” coverage across the region by 31st March 2021 (completion date). The communities that will benefit from this Phase 3B extension of FTTP coverage include Chipping Sodbury, Coalpit Heath, Cromhall, Falfield, Lansdown, Little Badminton, Rangeworthy, Tockington, Tormarton and Yate.
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Councillor Ben Burton said:
“We are pleased to announce this latest phase in our broadband programme which will deliver superfast fibre connections to even more hard to reach rural properties.
We are working to ensure that no part of the community is left behind. We understand how important broadband is for people, especially those running rural businesses, so we are very pleased to help even more of our residents get connected to a faster service. In the areas where we have not been able to help so far, we have been trying to find alternative ways to support these communities and we will continue to do all we can until everyone in the area has access to good speeds.”
Connie Dixon, Regional Partnership Director for Openreach, said:
“Lockdown showed us that having great connectivity has never been more important. The Openreach network carried around 60 per cent more traffic in the South West in May this year than it did in February – and it didn’t skip a beat. It stood the test of home-working and home-schooling and, through our partnership with Connecting South Gloucestershire, thousands of homes and businesses can upgrade to the best broadband available – Full Fibre.”
Many of the homes and businesses included in this latest phase are already able to contact their provider to upgrade to a full fibre broadband package of their choice, while others are still in the commissioning or build stage until early 2021. Unfortunately, there’s no mention in today’s announcement of how much funding (reinvestment or otherwise) is involved in the Phase 3B deployment.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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It should cost South Gloucestershire no new funds. Original public subsidy budget was £6.89m and ~130 cabs were installed. This should cost no more than £5m based BT submissions to the CMS select committee in 2016. So lots of underspend.
This leaves a BT Capital contribution of ~£1.8m and the clawback which we now understand from the NAO includes the outstanding capital of ~£3.2m (based on £788m -BT accounts as opposed to the £900m in the NAO report).
99% coverage with FTTP is good and proper to see. All English projects need to end this way and solves for the most part the B-USO problem by getting remaining premises under contract. Vouchers just create a mess at the edge of a uniform network needed to deliver predictable user experiences.
Lol I’m in Gloucestershire and have been stuck on FTTC since they first started the fastershire thing and just stuck a cab around 300m away and that’s it. Been on the same 65mbps for 6 years and wish they’d bring fttp. The new build a 10 minute walk away got fttp installed when they built it last year so it seems some of the infrastructure is there atleast.
@GL1 From 2012 requirements perspective 60Mbps is good, and the fibre path exists so it can be extended by BT. A great deal of FTTP in-fill (beyond 1000M) was budgetted for, and this is why there has been so many Parliamentary inquiries on the matter.
The money has not disappeared but at least 10% of the 6m rural premises are not under contract.
My premise is actually included on this list so am extremely pleased finally.
@GL1 We’ve had 10yrs of ~11mbps on an extremely dodgy 2km stretch of cable that is plagued by endless faults.
It took a failed Community Fibre Scheme and 2yrs of hassling the council to get our group of houses to be included in this. We even had the local prison run fibre on the poles outside our house whilst we got nothing. FTTP was installed last year 300 meters away and we were excluded then too.
Actually 208 premises.
http://sites.southglos.gov.uk/broadband/2020/10/06/phase-3b-superfast-broadband-programme-premises/
So who is doing this work Openreach Sub Contractors who are Cowboys whilst Openreach put their own Engineers out of work or
get the Bully Managers to pick on certain staff and push then out !!
Think the CEO needs to make a visit to certain Build Teams!!
Is there anyway to find out the next areas Open Reach will enable in the Yate area BS37?