The UK state aid supported Superfast West Yorkshire and York (SFWYY) programme and Openreach (BT) have announced the completion of their Phase 2 deployment contract, which has spent the past few years working to extend the local availability of “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) services (including a fair bit of full fibre).
At present around 97-98% of premises across West Yorkshire and York can already access to a 30Mbps+ capable ISP network, although as we recall the second contract under the SFWYY scheme – worth some £19.5m – was intended to reach an additional 41,270 premises by summer 2021. The good news is that this has now completed, albeit perhaps a little later than originally planned.
All of this means that, since work began in 2013, the SFWYY programme has managed to invest a total of £45m with Openreach – across two contracts – to reach an additional 114,000+ premises. This reflects homes and businesses that would have previously been too expensive to upgrade by purely commercial builds, or where the wait for such services could have been many years longer.
As part of this build, Openreach has enabled 97 exchanges, built more than 1,200 fibre structures (e.g. street cabinets), erected hundreds of new telegraph poles and laid thousands of kilometres of underground fibre optic cables.
Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire, said:
“Faster, reliable broadband has become as important as other utilities – not just for games and movie nights but for opening up flexible working opportunities, especially with Covid still affecting our lives.
Thanks to the partnership between West Yorkshire Combined Authority and Openreach we’ve been able to improve broadband connections for thousands of homes and businesses in urban, semi-urban and rural areas across West Yorkshire and York. By working together we’ve been able to increase skilled employment, create jobs and training schemes and boost local economies.
Although this phase of the programme is at an end, I remain committed to seeing Superfast West Yorkshire and York continue its work in the future, so that everyone and every business in West Yorkshire has the opportunity to connect to reliable services for work or play.”
Robert Thorburn, Openreach Partnership Director for the North, said:
“The success of the Superfast West Yorkshire & York partnership is a great achievement and testament to the team who have worked so hard for the past eight years.
Superfast West Yorkshire and York will continue to help communities to improve their broadband speeds working both with, and independently from, Openreach.
Our own work sees full fibre being built to hard-to-reach parts of West Yorkshire including Cullingworth, Flockton, Kirkburton, Otley and South Elmsall and last year we announced plans for a further 325,000 premises including more than 40,000 in rural, harder to reach communities.”
As usual we have to remind our readers that these are not automatic upgrades, you still need to order a faster broadband service from an ISP in order to benefit. Otherwise, the funding for Phase 2 included £6.89m from the Building Digital UK (BDUK) Superfast Extension Plan and £3.49m from BT. A further £6.89m was also secured from the England European Regional Development Fund (EERDF) and some additional funding came from the local authorities.
The focus is now switching to how much gigabit-capable broadband coverage can be delivered across the region, including via the Government’s new £5bn Project Gigabit programme. The latter comes under LOT 8 (West Yorkshire and parts of North Yorkshire), which has identified that around 125,200 premises may be in-scope, but the first contracts for this aren’t expected to be awarded until toward the end of 2023.
I could imagine that they moved their efforts from FTTC to FTTP in the past couple of years rather than continuing to deploy FTTC, right?
They did.
The article does specifically say that the last 11,000 were FTTP.
Now just need to do it all again with FTTP.
So we leave on a street just off Otley Road ls16. Do we have fibre broadband? No.. open reach have forgotten us. Hopeless!
They do have FTTC 80/20 there
I know openreach are so slow rolling out fttp in ls16 I been waiting ages for fttp to become available in my area