Plans for over 30% full fibre in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
New plans that will hopefully be approved by Cambridgeshire County Council in the next week should in conjunction with commercial FTTP roll-outs push the combined are of Peterborough and Cambridgeshire to the point where more than 3 in 10 premises have a full fibre broadband option by 2022.
The plan is building on the current 9.35% full fibre figure for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough.
- Completion of superfast broadband roll-out with FTTP, which is aiming for a 99% target in 2020 (currently 97.2%) which includes funding for 5,000 premises (an additional 1.8%).
- Maximising commercial investment - i.e. removing barriers that mean commercial operators go elsewhere
- Use of council assets - enabling commercial access to ducting under cycle paths and busways where applicable.
- Upgrading 150 public buildings with full fibre
- Council policy of fibre ducting to be included in all new transport infrastructure schemes
We have run the numbers and if the CityFibre/Vodafone Gigafast roll-out was to reach 100% of premises in Peterborough the full fibre coverage for the combined area would rise to 29.5%, but there are likely to be some small gaps e.g. flats where a landlord refuses access. So as long as the 5,000 premises of rural FTTP are delivered and CityFibre gets very close to 100% coverage the 30% for 2022 looks like a slam dunk.
Pulling together the statistics for Cambrideshire and Peterborough into a combined area creates the following stats:
- Total number of premises 375,400
- Superfast coverage at over 24 Mbps 97.18%
- Ultrafast coverage at over 100 Mbps 64.25%
- Full fibre coverage via Openreach GEA-FTTP 3.91%
- Full fibre coverage from all FTTP operators 9.35%
- Premises with under 15 Mbps 2.2%
- Premises not meeting 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up 1.9%
- Premises with under 10 Mbps 1.3%
- Premises with under 2 Mbps 0.5%
