Colton Superfast Broadband Why it's important and how we can get it......Mike Postle (mike@mpo1.uk)

Looking beyond Phase 1

With the current Connecting Cumbria project due to complete its work of bringing SFBB to 93% of premises in Cumbria (with the rest getting 2 Mb/s minimum) by the end of 2015, attention has been turning to what comes next.

Last February the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) announced an additional £250m pot of funding for what has now become known as phase 2 of SFBB implementation. Cumbria’s £2.8m share has now been confirmed but the required matched funding has not. The expectation is that it will shortly be confirmed coming from a mix of Cumbria County Council and European funds.

What’s not agreed is how to proceed with procurement – that’s expected sometime in December. In a nutshell, the options are to either use the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) tendering framework or to go through the full European (OJEC) tendering process. The BDUK process will almost certainly result in a further contract with BT, limited community engagement but lower management and procurement overheads. The OJEC process would potentially give more community engagement and flexibility but could be expensive to manage (15% of project costs have been quoted). Whichever way it goes, we can expect to see some of the areas which don’t get connected to SFBB in phase 1, receiving the benefits of this higher speed under phase 2. Phase 1 ‘Community Build’ discussions with parishes have been suspended (to be resumed next month in a modified form) as phase 2 may well supersede a lot of the thinking behind them.

And Phase 3? Well expect something in the Autumn statement. This will be the first shot in developments foreshadowed in the recent DCMS report looking into the future requirement for digital communications. Holiday reading can be found on : thinkbroadband.com/news/

And the report itself on:

digital-communications-infrastructure-strategy

The consultation about this report lasts until the end of this month.

There’s a lot going on……..