Effect of BDUK on North Yorkshire

Progress on the BDUK plans for North Yorkshire have come to light over the last week, without there being any overt announcements.

North Yorkshire (incl York itself) had a pretty sparse plan for commercial coverage - reaching only 33% of the county.

In July, they became the first county to sign up to BT, and to make use of their BDUK funds (augmented with a large chunk of ERDF funding too). The Funding summary:

BT commercial funding (to July): £23M
BT commercial funding (to come): £11M
BT share of non-viable funds:    £10M
BDUK share:                      £17.8M
ERDF share:                      £ 8.6M
Total:                           £70M

Last week, in evidence to the Rural Affairs committee in the commons, the boss for NYNET said that they have specifically planned for coverage (using FTTC) rather than speed (using FTTP) - although the technology choice is BT's. NY aims within BDUK are for 90% superfast coverage, and 10% USC coverage. However, they intend to foster community schemes for those within the 10% - which tend to use fixed wireless (although he doesn't expect BT to depend on fixed wireless, satellite or 4G at all, or as little as possible).

Extrapolating from BDUK numbers, this gives us the following information on properties:

Total properties: 372k
NGA White Area: 248k
Commercial: 124k

BDUK SFBB Target: 211k (90%)
BDUK USC Target:  37k (10%)

So the SFBB component of BDUK is more than 50% bigger than the commercial rollout!

Now, on the Openreach "where and when" pages, this plan can start to be seen - almost every exchange in the county has changed to be either "coming soon" or a "future exchange" in 2013 or 2014 - and yet none have appeared in any of the Openreach "exchange announcements" that we see periodically.

Here is my summary of the exchange information within North Yorkshire (the #Lines figure is total number, not the number where SFBB will be deployed):

Number of...			Exchanges 		#Lines
Announced Commercially		18		
	Taking Orders			12		149k
	CS				2		 18k
	FE				4		 24k
Unannounced (BDUK)		119		
	CS - March 2013			10		 27k
	FE - 2013			53		 79k
	FE - 2014			56		 50k
Unannounced (Unviable)		8			  2k
Total				145

Note: 10 of these exchanges have progressed far enough to be "coming soon" with dates as soon as March 2013, and yet are still unannounced - I can't help but wonder if these are part of the final tranche of commercial exchanges, rather than being true BDUK coverage.

There are also bordering exchanges close to the county boundary that look like they provide coverage within the county too... and some of those too seem to have become these mysterious "unannounced" exchanges, but with CS and FE status. These amount to another 9 exchanges that currently serve 17k lines.

The Superfast North Yorkshire website currently predicts that the SFBB coverage is going to come from upgrading 700 cabinets. Presumably some of these will be infill in the 18 commercial exchanges, while some will be used in the 119 in-county exchanges, and some for the 9 out-of-county exchanges.

A further couple of snippets on this project...

These exchanges are still not officially announced anywhere, but I realised that in the Openreach "future exchanges" document, every exchange added as part of this project is in lower case, while the announced ones are in upper case.

From this, I noticed that every single exchange in 2014 is for North Yorkshire.

I also noticed that 21 exchanges have been specified as FTTP alone. These are all exchanges of between 200 and 400 lines, so perhaps suggest that theses will become FOX.

WWWombat

I have been wondering if Openreach only announce commercial rollouts. The Cornish exchanges never seemed to be announced by Openreach they just appeared in the lists as have the N.Yorks ones.

In some ways I can understand this, they are not Openreaches to boast about but are joint with the council and BDUK so will only be covered by joint announcements like Ainderby Steeple.

There have been announcements by the local teams, Supoerfast Cornwall and starting to be made by N.Yorks and BT has announced to signing of the contracts but never mentions individual sites. This begins to look like contractual terms / policy.

You could be right there.

There might also be something with the EU funding (for both Cornwall & North Yorkshire), where the project requires that little "partly funded by the EU <whatever> fund" logo.

That obviously applies to the cabinets themselves, but probably applies to any press releases... and, legally at least, twitter probably qualifies!