A Question of Eligibility as N.Ireland’s Fibre Rollout Skips Homes

The £165m state aid supported Project Stratum deployment in Northern Ireland, which is helping to spread a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP network to a further 76,000 premises in rural areas (84,500 if you include the expansion), has come under fire for how it appears to skip some nearby homes.

At present just over 78% of premises in N.Ireland can already access a gigabit-capable broadband network (Thinkbroadband’s data), thanks largely to commercial builds from Openreach (BT), Virgin Media and Fibrus etc. On top of that, Fibrus also holds the delivery contract for Project Stratum and expects to have completed 19,000 of its total contracted premises by the end of 2021.

However, a new report on the BBC has raised questions over the eligibility criteria for premises in the scheme, not least because the network appears to skip some homes in areas where the new fibre is being built. One example shows two directly neighbouring houses, yet only one of those will be included, despite both seeming to receive well below 30Mbps speeds today. At the same time, some “derelict” homes nearby did get included in the rollout.

Sadly, the BBC’s article is lacking some key details, which makes it difficult to identify what is actually going on. For example, there appears to be some fleeting suggestion that the example properties might have had a fixed wireless access (FWA) network and satellite connection installed in the past, possibly as a result of an older voucher scheme (e.g. BBSS – Better Broadband Subsidy Scheme), but at no point is this fully clarified.

In any case, the homeowner indicates that their wireless connection can be slow, especially when his family is all online, although it remains unclear whether the associated network itself is actually rated for speeds of 30Mbps+. If so, then that would perhaps go some way to explaining the exclusion. But again, this isn’t clarified.

Cathal O’Connor said:

“I was quite surprised to see that our home wasn’t eligible for this new hyper-fast broadband service, but I was even more surprised when I discovered that my father’s house just next door was eligible for the service.

It’s very disappointing to see that when you have a service literally passing your doorstep you can’t access it and I think it’s not an uncommon story across rural communities whereby some households seem to be left out of this project.”

The article adds that those who took advantage of the BBSS would not be eligible under Project Stratum. But that scheme ended in 2018 and was only ever designed as a stop-gap solution, which was focused upon rural premises that were unable to get at least a 2Mbps download speed, including those who would NOT benefit from a “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) rollout within the next 12 months. It was thus not designed to act as a total roadblock for future FTTP builds.

Just to clarify. The Stratum contract is focused upon helping areas that cannot currently receive speeds of 30Mbps+. But we have seen some fringe examples in other programmes of properties being excluded because they might technically be able to access a speed of 30Mbps+, even though the real-world reality is often that they can’t (the variable nature of FTTC / VDSL2 lines is most commonly to blame for that).

However, the NI’s Department for the Economy (DfE), does say that some premises are still “under review” within the programme as part of efforts to determine their eligibility. But this is actually a normal process and won’t necessarily help those mentioned above, since the DfE already appears to have shunned their challenges.

In regard to derelict properties, the DfE said such premises would be “de-scoped” during the deployment phase to ensure public funds are allocated appropriately. This of course assumes they’re actually able to identify which premises are truly derelict. Often times local knowledge on this front can be more reliable than official databases.