Try reading the detailed reports that are out there along with listening to the interviews that have been given.

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

Lets start with a few basics. There are about 25 Million homes in the UK with about 50% passed by VM so about 12 Million so currently about 12.5 Million homes not served by VM so VM are looking to expand their coverage by about one third and the only way they can achieve that is by going into the larger rural towns, These are not small town you are probably looking at towns in the region of 50,000 people

Let's continue with some demographics, so we can understand the picture.

I have good figures for England+Wales - harder to find the equivalent for Scotland & NI. With this in mind, I'm assuming that E+W gets their fair share of the additional premises - so around 3.5m of the 4m premises.

In England & Wales, there are 5,500 places (from hamlets to cities) that the ONS classifies as "built up", and 95% of the population live in these places.

However, 50% of the population (and 49% of the households) can be found in just the top 31 of these places, with the smallest (Blackpool) having a population of 240,000 people.

To add 3.5m premises of additional coverage, you would now need to cover the top 100 built-up areas, with the smallest (Maidenhead) now having a population of 65,000.

The kind of place that will be at the tail end of this extra coverage include: Maidenhead, Wrexham, Folkestone, Newbury, Tunbridge Wells, Stafford, Lowestoft. The ones just outside the boundary would include Taunton, Macclesfield, Kettering, Runcorn.

I'm not hugely convinced that we tend to think of these places as "rural towns", but just "towns".

Note: To include towns of size 50,000, you would need to add another 28 places, and extend coverage by an extra 750,000. The tail would now have towns like Llanelli, Wellingborough and Horsham. Outside would be Bromsgrove, Banbury and Durham.

Have to say I agree - I don't really see them attacking too many new places, "just" filling in the (large) chunks of the urban areas that their predecessors didn't get to.

@WWWombat
Well when I was on the phone to them to confirm installing in my area over the next couple of months, the guy on the phone told me that this is the biggest install that they have ever done and that they have put loads of money in to this project, although I wasn't told how much though.

They also seem rather quick in the installs, I am following their progress on road works and its seems fast.

Going by their speed so far the rough estimate the guy told me on the phone seems about right.

Paul

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/6840-4-million-ex...

Has a graph of current coverage levels on it now. My money would be on VM looking to push a chunk of the areas above the 90% and hitting the 95% figure, thus proving no need for public money to be spent to solve the problem in the cities.

Agreed.

Useful graph - at least nearer the right, with cities & London boroughs pulled out separately. Over towards the left, it becomes a little harder to visualise the coverage of a "county" when there is probably only one or two towns covered.

What will be interesting is to see how this changes over the next 5 years. Hopefully you can keep this as a baseline, and start adding bars of a different colour on top as coverage increases...

What are the places identified with 2 letters, like LO and EE?

Yes - it sounds like they've kicked off this 4m project with a couple of "local" pre-cursor expansions - perhaps to figure out costs, perhaps to figure out take-up.

Then they've only done the full announcement when they have put together the full business plan based on some realistic numbers.

It'll be interesting to watch - and will probably spur BT on with G.fast too.

Unfortunately for the real rural areas though, it looks like this boost in competition will still happen only within the same first two-thirds of the country.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

Yes - it sounds like they've kicked off this 4m project with a couple of "local" pre-cursor expansions - perhaps to figure out costs, perhaps to figure out take-up.

Then they've only done the full announcement when they have put together the full business plan based on some realistic numbers.

Yeah.
I have also seen on roadworks VM going back to some of the new installs to repair some of the installs, so maybe going fast isn't good.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

It'll be interesting to watch - and will probably spur BT on with G.fast too.

Well, funny you say that, as soon as I found out VM was coming to my area, I noticed that BT started looking at continuing fibre rollouts in my area, but yeah it would be very nice to get G.fast, though I thought G.fast was to be used on FTTC and not FTTP, so if that is the case, then no gain in G.fast for us.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

Unfortunately for the real rural areas though, it looks like this boost in competition will still happen only within the same first two-thirds of the country.

Paul

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

Agreed.

Useful graph - at least nearer the right, with cities & London boroughs pulled out separately. Over towards the left, it becomes a little harder to visualise the coverage of a "county" when there is probably only one or two towns covered.

What will be interesting is to see how this changes over the next 5 years. Hopefully you can keep this as a baseline, and start adding bars of a different colour on top as coverage increases...

What are the places identified with 2 letters, like LO and EE?

Seems my borough (Newham) is currently at 25% according to that graph, which seems about right.

Paul

Yes I don't through older data away, so we can look back at 2015 as the start point.