The Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) in England has been chosen to lead a new £8m “GigaHubs” project that will rollout a gigabit-capable full fibre broadband network to reach a total of more than 350 public buildings (schools, council offices, hospitals etc.) across the Midlands.
Some £6.8m of the funding for this – on behalf of the 10 Midlands local authorities – will be coming from the government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency and will be used to create up to 235 of the c.350 GigaHub sites. An additional £1.2m via the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DUHC) will be used to reach a further 118 sites across the D2N2 areas of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
The local authorities which have agreed to be part of this regional project include Derbyshire, Herefordshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Telford and Wrekin and Warwickshire. Except Rutland does not have any sites in the current plans, but that is expected to change as the project progresses.
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The NCC aims to launch a tendering process for all of this in April 2023 and, it is hoped, a contractor to deliver the project will then be appointed by June 2023. Exact locations of which buildings and schools will benefit from the project are still to be identified, although the aim is for the full scheme to be live by Spring 2025.
Digital Infrastructure Minister, Julia Lopez, said:
“Our latest multi-million pound broadband investment in Nottinghamshire will enable schools, libraries, GP surgeries and other vital public services to deliver more for their communities. It also makes it more attractive for broadband firms to extend their networks to other homes and businesses across the county. This is all part of our £5 billion Project Gigabit to ensure no one misses out on lightning-fast internet speeds.”
Councillor Ben Bradley MP, Leader of NCC, said:
“With the way the world has changed these last few years, having access to reliable and fast broadband has never been more important. This project will help support children’s learning in the classroom and help those who can’t afford or access high-speed broadband at home. For example, being able to pop into their local library to help with things like online searches for work and training will help boost local skills and the economy.
Thanks to devolution negotiations, we’ve secured extra money to benefit even more local residents, particularly young people. It is a great example of how devolution has already brought even more investment to our area to help future generations thrive. Fantastic news.”
Projects like this typically tend to involve the deployment of a new Dark Fibre style network to public sector sites, which effectively act as anchor tenants for the new infrastructure. This could, in theory, later also be harnessed to help extend full fibre broadband to local homes and businesses. But the latter would require additional investment from the private sector.
£8m for only 350 sites? That’s £22,857 per site, or £635 per month over 3 years. Sounds like an expensive leased line network. One would hope that the ongoing running costs thereafter are lower – but that depends on how well the contracts are negotiated.
NE555 its if like any of other other gigahubs ts will be a dark fibre network providing an gig cability at the required site only — the site then in question will i assume need to order a suitable service from a provider once the network is available —
Are there any examples that can be pointed at elsewhere in the country that show running dark fibre to GP surgeries, schools, libraries etc. has driven deeper penetration of FTTP? I’ve never been convinced much by the argument except possibly for very rural locations where the main obstacle was backhaul.
In Southend I was involved in just such a scheme. In fact it was also the first major deployment of PIA in the early days of the offering from Openreach.
Cityfibre won what was called a PSN (Public Service Network) linking council sites to 4 council hub sites.
Initially this was to be a traditional dig network but we pivoted to PIA and also used a new cable type from Emtelle.
I moved on before the FTTH project started but the I understand the PSN cables formed part of the FTTH backbone later on.
How many of the 350 buildings already have access to a full fibre connection?
Or were already within 100m of a BT/OR leased line node?
This sounds much like the previous LFFN project which seemed like a ridiculously wasteful way to deploy services, in many cases to locations already served with fixed line Ethernet connections. Where is the research to show this is value for money? Perhaps a topic for the NAO and Public Accounts Cttee to investigate?
Perhaps we could ask BT, since they scooped several of those contracts.