Four million rural homes in line for ultrafast internet in a year
BEAMINSTER in Dorset, Clitheroe in Lancashire and Ely in Cambridgeshire are among the first towns to receive ultrafast full fibre broadband within 14 months, The Sunday Telegraph can disclose.
Openreach, the BT-owned operator of Britain’s biggest broadband network, this week sets out details of 227 rural communities that will be first to receive the cutting edge technology.
The announcement forms part of Openreach’s plan to extend full fibre broadband to the British countryside as well as in urban areas, which are cheaper and easier to supply because of the greater density of population and shorter distances involved. It follows successful village trials last year to connect 50,000 rural homes.
Clive Selley, Openreach chief, said: “Our ambition is to reach 15million premises by the mid 2020s if the right investment conditions are in place.”
The list of 227 towns also includes Aberdare and Carmarthen in South Wales, East Grinstead in Surrey, Shaftesbury in Dorset, Buckfastleigh and Budleigh Salterton in Devon and Liskeard in Cornwall. Openreach will begin the work before March 2021.
The scheme forms part of Openreach’s plan to reach 4million British homes – 12.5 per cent of the 32 million total – by the end of March 2021.
Government figures show that 7.1 per cent of Britain’s homes have full fibre coverage – a fibre optic connection that runs all the way to their home (so-called fibre to the premise, or FTTP) – and delivers speeds of 1 gigabit per second. During his campaign for the Conservative Party leadership last summer, Boris Johnson called for every home in Britain to have a full fibre broadband connection by 2025.
Mr Selley said the 2025 time frame would be a “significant challenge” and building more connections in rural areas would be essential.
“You can’t meet Boris’s objective without having a plan for rural areas and we have a plan,” he said, adding that the industry risked a “big backlash” if it failed to provide greater connectivity to towns and villages.
In the past, Openreach has been criticised for dragging its heels on the rollout, preferring to utilise its existing network of copper wires to supply in
‘Does it warrant £10million of subsea cabling to serve 200 homes when a radio solution would be better?’
ternet services. But it is now trying out ways of reducing the cost of laying fibre networks to rural areas, including machines that at the rate of nearly half a mile a day can dig trenches and install cables at the same time.
However, Mr Selley admitted that some remote areas would be difficult to justify economically.
“I’m thinking of some extreme cases – a Scottish island with 200 homes on it. Does it really warrant £10million worth of subsea cabling to serve 200 homes?
“Perhaps a radio solution would be better,” he said.