BT announced plans, with the aid of EU development funding, to extend the rollout of its super-fast fiber broadband network to 80–90% of homes and businesses in one of England’s most rural regions, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. This is a major coup for the region, but other regions will need to seek alternative investment routes because the same source is not available to them.

 

 

In May this year, BT announced that it would expand the rollout of its super-fast broadband (next-generation access) network in the UK, adding an extra £1 billion to the investment pot, and extending its targets from 40% of UK homes by the end of 2012 to two-thirds by 2015.

 

This appeared to be as far as the former incumbent would go under its own steam, as the investment case for connecting the remaining third of UK homes (most of which are in expensive-to-reach rural locations) simply did not stack up.

 

Yesterday’s announcement accelerates the rollout of super-fast broadband to a region where many consumers and businesses might otherwise have found themselves in the “final third” without next-generation broadband services for some years.

 

BT Wholesale CEO Sally Davis was keen to point out that once deployed, with the first connections to go live before March 2010, the new Cornish infrastructure would enable a variety of communications providers to offer super-fast broadband to their retail customers.

 

The investment gap in this case has been met by funds secured from the European Regional Development Fund’s (ERDF) Convergence investment, for which Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly qualify under EU development rules. The total budget set aside for the project is £132 million, of which up to 40.5% will come via the ERDF and the remainder from BT.