The West of England Combined Authority, which is led by Mayor Dan Norris and represents the local authorities of Bristol, South Gloucestershire, and Bath and North East Somerset (BNES), has today invested £2.5m to deliver a “Digital Office” that it hopes will “unlock” a £1.3bn annual boost to the region’s economy “powered by private investment in better broadband and mobile connectivity“.
What exactly is a Digital Office, you ask? Well, it’s described as being a “groundbreaking initiative” and “one of the very first of its kind in the country” that aims to help ensure benefits for residents across the region, and provide an important service for the telecom industry. So, lots of soundbites, yet we had to dig a little deeper to understand it.
After looking through other documents, the digital office sounds like a central repository for the local authorities to share plans, learnings and identify funding opportunities etc. This will apparently also serve as a “dedicated, single point of entry for the telecom industry” and there’s a pledge to “cut red tape” in order to “speed up infrastructure improvements in the West of England” (i.e. simplify and standardise processes across council boundaries, remove barriers to investment, and provide specialist advice to ensure project efficiency).
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The announcement suggests that one of the first efforts by the Digital Office will be to develop a regional “Dig Once” policy to help minimise the short-term disruption of street works. The idea, while good, would probably have been more effective had they started thinking about it around 6 years ago or earlier, at the start of the big fibre roll-out. But better late than never.
Freyja Lockwood, Digital Innovation & Transformation Programme Manager at the West of England Mayoral Combined Authority, said:
“The opening of our new Digital Office is an important further step to attract tens of millions of pounds of further investment into our region, particularly in more rural areas, helping people to work flexibly and stay connected in our modern world.
Better broadband will mean reliable connections for businesses and residents across the region. Streamlining processes now for businesses will make it easier in the future for residents to stream all of the brilliant film and TV that’s made here in the West of England.
The new Digital Office will accelerate the deployment of critical infrastructure in the West of England. By addressing common challenges, we can continue to drive innovation and create optimal conditions for broadband projects to be delivered more quickly.”
The primary focus above seems to be directed toward the challenge of figuring out how to help the 16,000 households in the region that are “still lacking access to superfast connectivity” (they don’t define “superfast“, but it’s usually download speeds of 30Mbps+). The announcement suggests that resolving this could cost between £24 million and £48 million.
Naturally, this is likely to cross a bit with the Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit broadband programme, and the £1bn industry-level Shared Rural Network (SRN) project to boost 4G mobile. But the goal is for the office to be a complementary effort to those.
As part of this the West of England Combined Authority is investing £2.5 million to deliver the Digital Office – including over £500,000 to build capacity within local councils across teams like planning, street works, and economic development. No doubt quite a few network operators would welcome any improvements in planning and permitting at local level, although it remains to be seen precisely what changes will actually come out of this.
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WECA and BCC are both notorious for burning money for fun.
Altnet activity in Bristol itself has been minimal, odd patches here and there with Netomnia likely being the largest Altnet.Very well covered by VM and Openreach built FTTP across a big chunk of it relatively soon. Cityfibre have their core network here, although dropped out of FTTP build even though it was on their very first build plans.
Parts of Bath well covered by VM, and they have built a good amount of FTTP to fill a lot of the gap on their network. Cityfibre started building, then dropped it. Truespeed did start building, although not sure how far they got. They do cover a lot of the surrounding areas as well, which is what they are best at. I believe they had quite low take up in places like Bath, Bradley Stoke, Thornbury etc, all well covered by VM. But I believe their take up in the rural areas is very good.