The early days of the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) projects were ones filled with lots of optimism and in some cases figures being quoted that have directly led to some of the complaints years later, and East Sussex County Council is going through various stages scrutinising the work of its projects and what its £15 million of spending has resulted in. A cabinet meeting was held on 6th June with the various presentations available online.
The word that has been abused the most has been ‘fibre’ with plenty of times when fibre coverage percentages were talked about and the public and press have taken this to equate to superfast coverage when as our data shows is definitely not the case.
The actual East Sussex BDUK project was signed in May 2013 with a target of 96% superfast coverage, with access to £10.6m from the central BDUK fund, £15m from the council and £9.6m that BT was willing to spend. Exactly how much money has been spent or not is unknown, but we do know phase I has delivered 347 VDSL2 cabinets and phase II 49 VDSL2 cabinets so far and 45 areas of FTTP, and more is on the way in phase II and phase III is actively under discussion.
The arguments now arising are around whether when the project was originally being talked about whether 100% superfast was set as an actual goal, from what we recall and can see it looks like while for some involved in the project at the earliest stages there may have been aspiration to reach 100%, once the reality of funding levels was known a slight less ambitious project and contract was signed. Of course at this point criticism starts to be thrown at the BT Group for not ponying up more money and resources to let counties reach their aspirational targets with ease.
So what do we know about coverage in East Sussex? We looked at the figures back in March 2017 but things have progressed since then and this time we are also breaking out the phase II cabinets that we know about.
| thinkbroadband analysis of Superfast, USC, USO and Fibre Broadband Coverage for East Sussex and The City of Brighton and its component district councils Figures 11th June 2017 |
||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Area | % fibre based FTTC, FTTP, Cable |
superfast > 24 Mbps |
superfast >= 30 Mbps |
ultrafast >= 100 Mbps |
Openreach FTTP | Under 2 Mbps USC | Under 10 Mbps USO | |
| Combined Area City of Brighton and East Sussex | 99.3% | 95.7% | 95% | 32.3% | 1.1% | 0.46% | 1.66% | |
| 378,147 premises for combined area | 375,417 | 362,072 | 359,216 | 122,288 | 4,002 | 1,735 | 6,278 | |
| Delivered via Phase I contract Excludes cable overlap |
100%(*) | 86.5% | 83.7% | 5.2%(**) | 5.24% | 1.6% | 5.9% | |
| Premises for Phase I | 64,897 | 56,135 | 54,318 | 3,375 | 3,400 | 1,038 | 3,828 | |
| Delivered via Phase II contract (SEP) Excludes cable overlap |
94.8%(*) | 81.5% | 77.3% | 0% | 0%(****) | 0.4% | 6.5% | |
| Premises for Phase II | 1,857 | 1,513 | 1,435 | 0 | 0 | 7 | 120 | |
| The City of Brighton | 99.6% | 99.4% | 99.4% | 90.9% | 0% | 0% (***) | 0.1% | |
| East Sussex | 99.1% | 93.9% | 92.7% | 1.7% | 1.61% | 0.7% | 2.5% | |
| Eastbourne | 99.6% | 98.8% | 98.6% | 1% | 0.94% | 0% (***) | 0.1% | |
| Hastings | 97.9% | 97.3% | 97% | 0.02% | 0.02% | 0.1% | 1.2% | |
| Lewes | 98.4% | 94% | 92.8% | 1.04% | 0.78% | 0.8% | 2.7% | |
| Rother | 99.9% | 90% | 88.5% | 1.1% | 0.93% | 0.7% | 3.9% | |
| Wealden | 99.5% | 90.5% | 88.4% | 4.12% | 4.07% | 1.5% | 3.9% | |
(*) while this is 100%, there are still additional premises where FTTP appears to be planned from phase I, our coverage tracking does not include FTTP until such time as it is live within each postcode.
(**) There is an additional 3.5% (2,272 premises) of cable coverage but as BT should not be paid for overlaps with Virgin Media premises we exclude these from the figures. It is possible given the Virgin Media expansion that some of these cable premises were delivered after the project enabled a VDSL2 cabinet, and thus may account for some of the difference with the BT figures.
(***) while 0% due to the rounding, there are 23 premises we believe with access to only 1 Mbps broadband in the City of Brighton and in Eastbourne just 6 premises sub 2 Mbps.
(****) The FTTP roll-outs are not split by phase in our data and thus where we find rural FTTP it is included in the phase I targets.
The figure of 49 cabinets covering just some 1,857 premises looks like we might have missed a zero from the figures, but a number of these cabinets are infill VDSL2 cabinets pulling premises up from sub superfast speeds at the fringes of existing cabinets and thus the premises count tends to be smaller. While smaller cabinets supporting fewer lines, or simpler all-in-one cabinets the costs are not massively lower, since the power and running fibre to the cabinet location will be the same, and it these two elements may actually be more expensive on infill cabinets. Without a doubt more FTTP could have been used, replacing some of these 49 phase II cabinets, but the side effect of that might be that phase III is left with no funding i.e. a very difficult game of rationing is taking place when you do not know what the exact price will be from UKPN for power at each cabinet.
An interesting take-away from reading the presentations to the council is that it appears some people do not understand that you need to actually order a faster service to benefit from the roll-outs, and this may be even more confusing for the 4,000 premises with native FTTP access since this is a much smaller set of providers, hence why with our site revamp we added filtering based on service availability to our packages this means if you look at a postcode such as TN32 5UN which has native FTTP available we should list just the GEA-FTTP packages plus ADSL2+.
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Any proof readers in the house ?
How about now?
this means if you look at a postcode such as TN32 5UN which has native FTTP available we should just the GEA-FTTP packages plus ADSL2+.
list added
I would say that the main report provides a pretty good summary of the roll-out and issues and will probably be echoed by the great majority of the BDUK local projects. Possibly the most important conclusion is the expectation management. In a perverse way, the higher the superfast coverage, the more unfair it will appear to those left out. In any event, the contractual requirements appear to have been more than met, but many might say that was they were too conservative in the first place.
https://democracy.eastsussex.gov.uk/documents/s14231/Item%206a%20-%20Appendix.pdf
Andrew .. are the cabinet numbers reported or have you gleaned those separately?
EulerID, – 20,000 left for phase 3 is why they are not happy, and there is no statement on who paid what.
@ValueForMoney we know the pool of monies that went it, and are still delivering so all one can say without a bookcase full of invoices is the maximum cost of what has been delivered, but per premise will drop as more is delivered as parts of the investment get recycled.
On the 20,000 remember this is also in part due to a change from 24 Mbps to 30 Mbps for superfast definitions, and pesky builders who keep building new premises.
As for cabinet numbers, not going to be giving those away, public get the benefit of our work in the coverage checkers and filtering systems on site. Others who want to write consultancy reports can approach us on a commercial basis.