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[Black Sheep]

Please see info just received about the continuing roll-out, and BTOR's take on it.

You may have picked up that the National Audit Office (NAO) have published a report that is a bit hard on the Government, and BT, about superfast broadband rollout to rural areas. You may get asked about it, and we guess you would like to know our stance anyway. So here’s a view.
Our commercial rollout to cover two thirds of the UK is at least 18 months ahead of schedule, the fastest in the world and ahead of every commitment we have ever made to the city and to our customers. The Government set themselves a bold ambition of having 90% of the country enabled with SFBB by the end of 2015 and the NAO report has today said the Government is two years behind. We don’t agree with many points the NAO raised and we continue to chat with them about our view on things.
The report implies that BT is the only realistic winner of any regional bids. All we can say in reply is that we have applied the great learning and cost efficiencies from our commercial rollout, and we are in a position to offer counties the best possible terms. Deploying fibre broadband is an expensive long-term business so it was no surprise others dropped out as the going got tough. But in BT we have stayed the course and invested significant sums in rural Britain, even though the payback period in such areas is longer than in the first two thirds of the UK, which has been funded to the tune of £2.5bn by us alone. Also, under the BDUK process, we need to provide evidence for every single item of cost and our costs are rigorously audited. The BDUK programme is going to transform broadband speeds in rural areas benefiting small businesses and consumers alike. BT has already committed more than £500 million to the programme with more than a third of the contracts yet to be signed, including a very large one in Scotland. We believe we will contribute around 38% of the total funds by the end of the programme, which is well above the 23% claimed in the report.‪
So hopefully these facts help.

I'm fully expecting the usual suspects to 'play' with the factual figures quoted above, and make BT a big, bad monster again. 

[c6em]

I thought the NAO was meant to be impartial…….

The NAO key facts summary selectively quotes their own report text – presumably to make some political point and to achieve media coverage.  This is where the 2 year delay figure comes from.

The actual report says from the projections available it expects overall superfast coverage in program areas to reach 90% in May 2013, 12 months later than the programme’s initial planned completion date……and THEN it goes on to talk about total completion in March 2017. (Part 5, clause 5.5 and figure 16)....from which we get the 2 year behind schedule headline.

Actually the scheme is running 12 months behind schedule according to the detailed report.

I suspect the NAO of deliberately choosing which titbits to include in the key facts summary at the front for its own peculiar reasons.
Probably I'm one of the few that has actually read the whole thing.
http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/10177-001-Rural-Broadband_HC-535.pdf