The Government’s Building Digital UK team has started a new Public Review that aims to identify any existing or planned commercial coverage of gigabit broadband ISP networks in County Durham (England), which should help to establish the areas where public investment may be needed to deploy the service.
Just to recap. The Government’s new £5bn Project Gigabit programme aims to ensure that at least 85%+ of UK premises can access a gigabit-capable connection by the end of 2025 (here). The effort for this will primarily be targeted at the final 20% of premises (i.e. the hardest to reach rural and some sub-urban areas), where commercial investment models tend to fail.
In England the new programme will be much more centrally managed than the original Superfast Broadband (SFBB) scheme and that explains why the consultation for County Durham is being run by BDUK, rather than the county council. In any case, the first step is in identifying precisely which areas are not currently expected to benefit from gigabit speeds under existing deployments, or any plans for the next 3 years.
Interestingly, the Durham County Council only recently ran a similar Open Market Review (OMR), although this was much more widely focused upon the entire North East of England region (here). The OMR indicated that planned commercial coverage for gigabit-capable broadband would reach approximately 714,281 premises within the next 3 years, and would therefore leave the remaining 654,093 premises without access to gigabit-capable broadband (‘white areas‘).
The new consultation, which will be open to responses from the public and stakeholders until 18th July 2021, seeks to validate the outcome of the aforementioned OMR to “ensure that it correctly represents the information provided by suppliers in the course of the OMR and to ensure that the right areas are targeted for government investment.” Interestingly, this one puts the number of “white” premises at 540,981.
Readers may recall that Durham has already been announced as being among the first areas (Phase 1a) expected to benefit from Project Gigabit (here and here). The new Public Review also includes several maps to help visualise areas that may be in need of intervention (public support) under the new project. We’ve included the one for Durham below, but the main OMR includes maps from across the North East of England (Northumberland etc.).
Assuming all goes to plan then the first contracts under this could be awarded by early 2022, but such things can be complicated, and we wouldn’t rule out some delays. The Government have also forewarned that they consider the final 0.3% of premises “could be prohibitively expensive to reach” via even their gigabit programme (i.e. the same sort of area as their 10Mbps USO was supposed to fix and that has suffered problems). A separate consultation is currently considering how to tackle those.
As you say the maps are absolute garbage as ever, I have had a read through and the postcode file and maps bear no mention of the latest confirmed Openreach exchange plans for the North East. Indeed there are areas currently being built and even some able to order a Gigabit service still classified as white on the most recent OMR.
Roll on the next waste of tax payers cash.
Those map layout are pretty absolute garbage awful indeed
Even this news is probably not promised for me. Virgin cabled our street and left our house out because we have a blocked paved drive, yet other properties in the town with block paved drives they did cable. Complained and nothing has been done
Digital Durham have added a decent interactive map and spreadsheet with postcode detail on the Durham.gov.uk website
https://www.durham.gov.uk/article/25622/Broadband-coverage-Public-Review