The Country Land and Business Association (CLA), a land owners lobby group that covers England and Wales, has warned that BT's currently projected deployment of superfast broadband ( FTTC / FTTP ) services will not go far enough and leave the "final third" (33%) of UK homes and businesses "without a decent infrastructure".

The comments come just two days after BT announced the next phase (8) of its rollout, which will see an additional 114 telephone exchanges being upgraded to support the new services by Autumn 2012 (here). The association welcomed this news but warned that BT's primary motive "is making the already-fast faster".


In fairness a small portion of BT's deployment, such as through the earlier announced expansion to 41 "market towns" (here), have gone towards more rural or rural-ish areas. Crucially this will also be expanded through funding from the governments Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office.

The BDUK office aims to ensure that 90% of "people in each local authority area" can access a superfast broadband (25Mbps+) ISP service by 2015, although the remaining 10% have only been promised a minimum download speed of at least 2Mbps.

However the scope of BDUK's investment and thus deployment flexibility is typically focused more tightly towards major suppliers, such as BT , Fujitsu Telecom and KCOM ( KC ). As a result the money is less likely to be used in funding projects that involve smaller operators, which are sometimes cheaper and better equipped to handle remote locations.

It is worth remembering that most of BT's already announced deployments have been related to its original plan and has not fully included rural areas that could be upgraded through match-funding with BDUK money. BT's FTTC coverage will almost certainly extend beyond 66% but at this stage we do not know when or by how much. BT itself would love to reach 90% but this requires almost all of the BDUK funding, which is a tough sell even for the government.