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[Bowdon]

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/05/q1-2018-bduk-extend-superfast-broadband-to-4-85-million-premises.html

The £1.6bn+ state aid supported Broadband Delivery UK programme has published its final progress update for Q1 2018, which confirms that it has so far helped 4,852,808 extra premises across the United Kingdom to be put within reach of a fixed “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) network.

Currently a little over 95% of premises in the UK are estimated to be within reach of a fixed line superfast broadband network, which is partly thanks to the Government’s BDUK scheme. The next step will be to extend this to 98% by around 2020, while the final 2% is expected to be tackled via a mix of alternative network providers (altnets) and the forthcoming 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO).

Most of the BDUK roll-outs have been supported by contracts that harness Openreach’s (BT) ‘up to’ 80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) and a small bit of their ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) technology. More recently we’ve also seen fixed line and wireless altnets like Gigaclear, Call Flow, UKB Networks and Airband win a number of contracts, particularly around remote rural premises where Openreach tends to struggle.

We should point out that the Government has made this their final quarterly “premises passed” progress update for the BDUK programme, which is disappointing because related deployments are expected to continue until 2020 (tracking progress will now become harder); albeit at a slower pace due to the completion of the primary Phase 1 + 2 contract phases.