Dorset UK Council Celebrate Completion of £23.6m Broadband Project

After 11 years and £23.6m of public investment, the Dorset Council in the South of England has today celebrated the completion of their Superfast Dorset project (now part of the wider ‘Digital Dorset’ scheme), which helped to extend “superfast” and “ultra-fast” broadband networks to an additional 85,000 premises.

At present around 98% of premises in Dorset (excluding Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole) have access to a 24-30Mbps+ capable fixed “superfast broadband” service, which falls to 61% for gigabit speeds (1000Mbps+). But while most of that has come from commercial investment, the Superfast Dorset contract(s) with Openreach (BT), which helped to extend FTTC and FTTP coverage into rural areas, did play a big part.

The council is today marking the end of that roll-out programme, which has also seen an additional £5.3m returned to the county “as part of a ‘cash back’ deal with Openreach” (i.e. clawback from BT Group due to high customer take-up of the state aid funded network build).

Dorset Council’s Deputy Leader, Cllr Richard Biggs, said:

“I am incredibly proud of the success of our broadband rollouts and the impact they have had on boosting the economy and improving people’s lives.

As a direct result of people connecting to broadband under these contracts, Openreach has paid back £5.3m to the council, some of which we have re-invested into delivering more connectivity.

We know there are still areas of our county that need better connectivity, and we continue to work with central government to help make that happen.”

Martin Williams, Openreach Partnership Director for the South West of England, added:

“We know how important fast reliable broadband is for modern day life and our engineering team are immensely proud to have connected 85,000 premises in partnership with Dorset Council through the superfast programme.”

The focus has now switch to the Government’s £5bn follow-on Project Gigabit broadband programme. Speaking of which, rural ISP Wessex Internet recently announced that they’d begun the build phase of their new £33.5m state aid supported Project Gigabit contract for Dorset and South Somerset (here), which will extend their gigabit speed full fibre (FTTP) network to cover 21,400 hard-to-reach premises.