Agenda item

Steve Brooks from On Lincolnshire to give an update.

Mr Steve Brooks, Programme Manager for On Lincolnshire gave a presentation to Members on the progress of the Lincolnshire Broadband Project particularly the BDUK – BT project. Phase one of the project was finished.

It was proposed that by the end of March 2016 90% of the county would have superfast broadband (>24Mb/s). The remainder of the county would get at least 2Mb/s by satellite technology.  The project capital costs were in the region of £40M which was made up of funding from BDUK, Lincolnshire CC and the seven shire District Councils, European Regional Development fund and BT.  The deployment of the project was based around the most cost effective solution for the funding available whilst achieving maximum overall coverage.  In an ideal world having fibre to everybody’s home would be the perfect solution however, the money required was not available to do this. Currently 147,606 homes had been enabled with a further 9,000 still to be done.  Total cabinets completed 692 out of the 801 total cabinets in the programme.  BDUK audited all quarterly claims from BT and were currently in the upper quartile of all UK projects in terms of value for money (VFM).  The Lincolnshire project was the third largest in the UK.  The ongoing collaborative working with the BT Openreach Team continued to deliver efficiencies and VFM.  Expenditure up to September 2015 was £17.22M against a projected target of £26.56M this meant an under spend of £9.34M.  As at the end of the contract the projected under spend was in the region of £10.33M but this would be finalised at the end of August 2016.  Any under spend had to be reinvested in to the project.  The contract projected cost per premises was in the region of £255 however, the actual cost was £116 as at 30th September 2016.  Take up of superfast broadband was the key objective with BT giving £10 back for every premises which was reinvested back into the programme.  The payback was every two years which amounted to £4.6M.  Currently funding for the second phase was in the region

Currently within SK a total of 113 cabinets had been completed. 20,987 premises had been enabled which amounted to 14.21% of the total.  There were 21 cabinets outstanding and take up was in the region of 21½%.  Various communities had been added for further feasibility checks along with a list of postcodes where a number of communities had missed had been passed to BT for further work to be carried out.  The use of the under spend would be used in phase two.  BT were currently doing remodelling work to take account of the under spend and the revised plan should be known by the end of March.  It was hoped that phase 2 should be complete by the end of June 2017 and would deliver an additional 4801 Superfast premises. However, with the additional funding this figure would increase. All the under spend was to be used so BT was keen to explore other options such as wireless technology which was being piloted in other area of Lincolnshire.

FTTRN (Fibre To he Remote Node) technology had now been approved and brought the electronics closer to the end user. Typically serves clusters of 16 premises. Also vectoring was being undertaken at 23 cabinets within Lincolnshire. Out of sight fixed wireless technologies were also being trialled in West Lindsey.  By the end of the phase 95% should have Superfast coverage. However, the greater challenge is the remaining 5% which covers approximately £1.5M premises that are located in a 70% of the UK land mass area.   The results of the wireless trials are important to see if they would offer a viable solution.

The member of the public present, Mr Briggs asked how decisions were made about which premises to include. Mr Brooks replied that it came down to VFM and the cost per head and getting the most for the money available.  He appreciated that due to farms remote access getting connectivity was difficult although satellite access was available.  They would try where possible to get cover.  BT had identified where areas had been missed and these were being looked into.

Mr Brooks indicated that he would be happy to come and speak to the Estate co-ordinator and meet on site to discuss the issues involved.  He was also happy to be invited to speak at Parish Council meetings about the project.

The Chairman thanked Mr Brooks for his informative presentation.