Council statement for 10th June 2010

Dear Broadband Group members

Following a meeting with BT Openreach earlier this week, I thought you'd like a progress update.

As you will be aware, both councils (Basingstoke & Deane and Hampshire) have signed a non disclosure agreement with Openreach which has allowed Openreach to disclose some commercially sensitive information to help us build a more detailed picture and understanding. This is enabling us to see if there are options that may not have been considered before and to see if there are any new dimensions that we may be able to bring into the consideration.

Openreach has now helpfully carried out an amount of detailed analysis for us on the Basingstoke project, particularly focused on the areas both selected and not selected for NGA roll.

Openreach has segmented the excluded Cabinets and areas  into a number of categories explaining why some Cabinets will not be enabled and have shared this detail with us on a confidential basis. For some limited number of Cabinets there is clear technical evidence that the use of VDSL at this time (the Cabinet based technical broadband standard) would not deliver a satisfactory Service bandwidth. For these Openreach are looking at new options and technologies that may be developed in the near future but there is no immediate solution. Openreach have committed to explore these with us at forthcoming meetings. For the rest of the Cabinets there a variety of commercially led reasons for their current exclusion. There are possibly more immediate solutions here, one of which is to define likely take up and commitment in each individual geography.

Thank you all for supplying us with your telephone numbers.  Openreach was able to match these against the categories above and it is reassuring to know that 7 of the 8 numbers are served by cabinets that are not likely to be affected by technical and speed issues and are thus maybe addressable through further work with Openreach.

I should also mention that since I last wrote to you, BT Group has made a further announcement about its NGA programme, committing to rolling out to 66% of the UK by 2015, subject to the right conditions - a positive move which we hope could result in further coverage for Basingstoke and the surrounding areas given the exchange's Ofcom Market 3 status (i.e. this is a competitive area for communications providers), but we understand it is very early days in the planning of this larger rollout and further announcements on locations will be some months. We expect further announcements on the extension of BT's NGA footprint in the Autumn.


Where to next?

1. The councils want to provide more information to Openreach on some of the individual cabinets highlighted to see if the reasons for non deployment could be mitigated and these will be considered before the end of June.

2. If the only issue for non-deployment is cost and the costs are not astronomical council officers want to explore what options are available to councils or eHampshire (as publicly funded bodies) to support deployment or alternatively if local groups/organisations could financially support deployment independently.

3. Agreement to being in a position to release as much information as possible to the broadband group, so that other options can be explored (eg wireless, cable) for those cabinets that will not be included in the NGA roll out under current plans.

Best wishes to you all

Therese Lawlor
Head of Strategy & Innovation
Basingstoke & Deane Borough Council
Civic Offices
London Road
Basingstoke
RG21 4AH

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