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[Bowdon]

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/01/2018-q3-bduk-take-up-progress-for-uk-superfast-broadband-rollout.html

The Government’s £1.6bn+ Broadband Delivery UK project has just published its latest take-up data to the end of September 2018 for its state aid supported roll-out of “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services across the United Kingdom, which has so far extended coverage to 5,011,052 extra premises.

The figures reflect the percentage of premises (homes and businesses) that have chosen to sign-up with a superfast broadband network (delivered via FTTC, FTTP or Fixed Wireless), specifically those which have been covered via support from the publicly funded BDUK programme (i.e. % subscribed of premises passed).

At present this data largely reflects both the first two phases of the programme and some related phase 2 extension contracts (technically Phase 3). We also skipped the June 2018 (Q2) data update last year and so have added that in below.

    BDUK Phases 1 (Finished Spring 2016)

    Supported by £530m of public money via the Government (mostly extracted from a small slice of the BBC TV Licence fee), as well as significant match funding from local authorities and the EU. The public funding is then roughly matched by BT’s private investment. Overall it helped to extend “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) services to cover 90% of homes and businesses in the United Kingdom.

    BDUK Phase 2 (Technically on-going)

    Supported by £250m of public money via the Government, as well as match funding from local authorities, Local Growth Deals and private investment from suppliers (e.g. BT, Gigaclear, Airband, Call Flow etc.). This phase extended superfast broadband services to 95% of premises in time for the end of 2017, although some extension contracts are on-going until c.2020 and will reach beyond 95%.

Phase One was broadly dominated by Openreach (BT) linked contracts, while the on-going Phase Two contracts have attracted a mix of extension deals alongside BT and several alternative network providers (Gigaclear, Airband, Call Flow etc.).

Crucially the BDUK contracts include a clawback (gainshare) clause, which requires the suppliers to return part of the public investment as customer adoption of the new service rises. The funding can then be reinvested to further improve coverage and speeds via future contracts. Efficiency savings from earlier phases can also be reinvested.

So far it looks as if a total of around £721m could in theory be returned via clawback from BT (Nov 2018 figure) and £210m from efficiency savings (Jan 2018 figure), which may rise again in 2019. BDUK has estimated that this reinvestment could be enough to boost the UK coverage of fixed line superfast broadband networks to around 98% by the end of 2020.