Openreach Puts New Fibre Community Partnerships On Hold
Openreach’s (BT) Fibre Community Partnership (FCP) scheme, which works with disadvantaged UK areas to help co-fund the deployment of new gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband ISP networks, has been put on hold for new applications in Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) due to “soaring demand“.
The CFP programme is typically focused on smaller or more remote rural communities that don’t currently have access to an ultrafast broadband network, and which may not benefit from one in the near future. Such schemes are often reached using a mix of community investment, as well as contributions from Openreach and grants from the Government’s gigabit voucher scheme.
However, in recent months the operator has experienced “soaring demand” for their FCPs, which may help to explain why we see so many complaints about a lack of communication from the operator by those who have applied for the scheme (this is a long-running issue, but it does seem to have got worse).
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In response, Openreach has decided to “temporarily” suspend new FCP registrations in Great Britain while they work through the backlog of current requests. The move will obviously cause disruption to those communities that were about to apply for such a project.
An Openreach Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk:
“We’ve now upgraded more than 2050 communities across the UK through our Fibre Community Partnerships (FCPs) and in the last few months we’ve seen requests soar. Due to current levels of demand, we’ve taken a decision to temporarily pause new registrations (in GB only) while we work through existing requests.
We’re continuing to connect those communities already in progress and will seek to align any new schemes with our wider build programme to make sure we reach the most people possible.”
We should point out that delays in FCPs can also be caused or exasperated by other issues, such as a lack of resources in the Government’s (DCMS) Building Digital UK team (i.e. taking longer to approve vouchers) and the disruption caused by Project Gigabit’s ongoing market reviews (necessary to avoid vouchers and gap-funded contracts overbuilding).
The recent storms can also take engineering resources away from such builds and may delay deployments – engineers might need to be mindful of their own safety and / or focus on repairs rather than new service provisions.
The big question now is over how long Openreach will take to tackle the backlog before being able to remove the pause on new registrations. No indication has been provided.
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UPDATE 3:16pm
Openreach has indicated that they may be able to open for new registrations from sometime “later this year,” but they’re currently unable to be more precise than that.
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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We have always called them Community Fibre Partnerships (CFP) now we have Fibre Community Partnership (FCP) what is the difference?
No idea, but my guess would be that they might have wanted to avoid confusion with the AltNet ‘Community Fibre’.
I believe new FCP registrations have already been on hold for over 2 months. It is my understanding that Openreach are currently reviewing their commercial rollout plans and current workloads in different parts of the country. I believe they are struggling to meet the 12 month validity terms associated with the BDUK vouchers.
given the performance on our local CFP I’d have to agree with Peter S on Openreach struggling to meet the validity terms, they took over 11 months to get most of the infrastructure in place to allow the 1st orders to be placed & just over 12 to get the rest (250 ish properties total) in & there are still a few properties where they can’t order due to a problem with HV power poles having been used for Phone cabling in the past. On top of this the actual installation timescales once ordering became available have been such that many (though not all) of the installations will be after the (extended by 2 months) voucher validity expires. Fortunately this was a demand led project so no financial risk to us on the ground.
most interesting but hardly surprising
This is a shame but somewhat understandable.
Looks like I was one of the lucky ones to get a CFP/FCP approved back in February 2021, with my connection just installed yesterday (still a few of the postcodes awaiting commissioning as all infrastructure appears in place). Seems like some that applied for projects just after myself are still awaiting approval or have been given longer lead times.
Hopefully with the general rollout really ramping up now, there will be less need for community fibre partnerships going forwards?!
What ‘ramping up’ still no plans at all in 01282 (apart from Padiham) so Openreach claim …
agreed
aligning the programme back to how it was originally envisaged , which the programme has moved significantly away from in the last 2 -3 years which is why it now finds its self with the current challenges it faces and validating that around its build programme up to 2025
This scheme is rubbish. BT accepted a scheme in my area, but ignored all activity for about five months.
Then I was contacted by a new person who said the previous person was on long term sick leave. That person was responsible for a vast area of the UK. The BTOR website didn’t work properly and people on the list of properties would tell me they couldn’t register. I tried emailing and phoning, only ever got in response which was they’d call me back, and never did.
The scheme collapsed.