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).

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.

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.