Airband Drop Northleigh from FTTP Build so Vouchers Can Deliver

The village of Northleigh in East Devon (England) now stands a good chance of being completely covered by a gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network after UK ISP Airband, which held a state aid supported contract to build in the area, de-scoped the community from its wider plans.

At present around 30 premises in the village are already covered by Openreach’s (BT) full fibre network under a contract with the state aid supported Connecting Devon and Somerset (CDS) programme, which was supported by almost £5,000 of funding from CDS in June 2020. But that’s only a small part of the entire village and civil parish, which leaves about 90 premises excluded.

Rival operator Airband also held a similar contract to cover the village, which is mainly because they’ll need to build a core fibre cable through the community in order to reach other locations. But Airband has now decided that it will not cover the rest of the village with its own FTTP network.

The fact that Airband held the contract for Northleigh meant that properties in other, more poorly served, parts of the village couldn’t apply for the Government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme, which offers up to £1,500 for households and £3,500 for businesses in the hardest to reach rural areas (with current speeds of less than 100Mbps) to support the cost of installing new gigabit-capable connections.

We’ve seen situations like this before in other parts of the UK and the solution is typically to de-scope the affected premises from the existing contract, although changing a legally binding contract can be tedious and takes time. But the good news is that Airband has agreed to the de-scope.

Redmond Peel, Director of Airband, said:

“We’ve explored all options in assessing this issue, but I feel we’ve reached a decision which will work for everyone. We have always maintained that our priority is to ensure that other communities would not be impacted by this decision to remove Northleigh from our planned rollout as we want to provide ultrafast broadband access to as many hard-to-reach rural communities as possible. Although it’s vital to build through Northleigh to continue delivery of the network across this part of Devon, residents in the community will now be able to deploy their own solution.”

Councillor Marcus Hartnell, Devon County Councillor, said:

“I know this process has been frustrating for the community but it was important that the full implications of descoping Northleigh from the Airband contract were fully considered. This included the impact of delivery of full fibre broadband to neighbouring villages within the contract area, of which I also represent. I welcome this decision by Airband and look forward to offering continued support to residents of Northleigh.”

The press release indicates that this de-scoping was requested by the community itself, which suggests that they already had an alternative project planned to tackle the existing coverage gap. The announcement makes no mention of it, but Openreach were originally lined-up to complete the village’s build – using vouchers – prior to Airband being awarded the CDS contract (CDS didn’t consult the community first).

Sadly, situations like this do occasionally happen, usually when vouchers agreements are reached (or nearly reached) at around the same time as separate state-aid supported contracts get signed (i.e. Openreach perhaps hadn’t got everything approved in time to get their plan included into the usual Open Market Review process). The new Airband contract also appeared to be envisaging a longer wait for FTTP to arrive.

In any case, it appears as if the residents of Northleigh would rather get FTTP from Openreach via vouchers, and perhaps a little sooner, than wait longer for Airband to deliver. Airband didn’t have to de-scope the community, but they chose to do so, which is nice.