County Broadband Launch Bespoke Team to Help Remote Premises Get Fibre

Rural UK ISP County Broadband (CB), which is currently deploying their gigabit speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across parts of Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk in England, has today launched a dedicated “bespoke connections team” (BCT) to find and deliver cost-efficient ways of connecting the remotest premises.

The provider, which is backed by £46 million of funding from Aviva Investors and is now rolling out to a total of over 150 villages, hopes that their new team will be able to help homes and businesses on the outskirts of villages, such as farms, horse riding schools and other typically remote local premises.

At present the new BCT is already said to be working on around “200 projects“, which range from just a single premise to a group of 30, all of which want to connect to a village’s FTTP network post-build. Often outlying premises like these can be overlooked during the core network build phase and that tends to reflect the disproportionate cost of service delivery.

For each project, the BCT considers government funding support, carries out property surveys and feasibility studies, and meets with the resident or business to see if they could self-fund digging a trench, if they are a farm, or extend a contract to help cover the costs of installing overhead cabling.

Gavin Ashkettle, Manager of County Broadband’s BCT, said:

“We have a saying here: The Build Team serves the needs of the many, and the Bespoke Connections Team serves the needs of the few,” he said.

We are excited to have formed this new team to ensure no-one is left behind including the hardest-to-reach premises that fall outside each village’s spine network – which is typically about 10-15%.

We can’t easily connect them for a variety of logistical and physical reasons that are both practically impossible to predict at the initial design stage and unavoidable once you get going at ground level.

They are usually hundreds of metres away from the outer edges of our core networks. It would be easy to dismiss them – perhaps large national providers would do so for financial reasons – but we want to work with them to find a way to connect them post-build that is cost-effective and fair.

Most people are genuinely supportive of what we do and very understanding of the situation. We are giving them that personal touch and demonstrating we are doing everything possible to connect them. They are amicable, accommodating and know to set aside budgets in advance,” he said.

Others are a bit trickier and can take a while to come around. One farmer was demanding we spend £10,000 to connect him. Digging across fields is expensive but eventually, after we continued to work with him, he paid a local contractor to dig a trench and we provided the ducting for free.

We had another customer who was quoted £34,000 from a national provider. We found a solution that didn’t cost a penny using existing infrastructure – overhead poles – revealed by a site survey. We tell everyone that there is always a solution if they are willing to work together with us.”

The provider now expects the number of projects being managed under their new team to “rapidly increase over the coming months and years” as they continue their rollout and reach into new areas. We should point out that other operators, such as B4RN, have also been quite pro-active with tackling such issues. But at the same time this kind of bespoke build work is rarely free and will often attract a fair cost.