The Cheshire East Council in England has awarded a new publicly funded contract, worth about £4.5 million, to UK ISP Airband in order to help extend gigabit-capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband to a further 4,100+ homes and businesses in some of the hardest to reach (e.g. rural) areas.
At present more than 95% of premises in Cheshire East should be able to order “superfast broadband” speeds (30Mbps+) and a big chunk of that is thanks to the state aid supported Connecting Cheshire programme (Cheshire East, Cheshire West and Chester, Halton and Warrington) with Openreach (BT), which has helped to extend the availability of FTTC and some FTTP services.
The full article can be found here thanks to ISPreview.
On the back of this I was also contacted by Lee Peters from Balderton near Chester. He an I have been in contact for a little while after he read our story on ISPreview a few months back. If you have not read this article it can be found here
Lee provided some interesting information on the next phase of Connecting Cheshire's broadband plan
'I believe there are approximately 22,000 premises ( NGA white ) within this region that could qualify under this procurement, and this hopes to target around 4,000 of these.
In addition to this, the Cheshire and Warrington Local Enterprise Partnership have recently published their digital infrastructure plan for the region, which may be of interest to you. It Includes the potential for local authority top up funding.
Something to note, which I have informed Lee off is the NGA areas. Connecting Cheshire's definition of these are:
a postcode is classed ‘grey’ if there is only one broadband infrastructure operator providing NGA services (supporting minimum speeds of at least 30 Mbps) to all premises in that postcode
a postcode is classed ‘black’ if there are at least two broadband infrastructure operators providing NGA services (supporting minimum speeds of at least 30 Mbps) to all premises in that postcode
all other postcodes remain ‘white’ (no NGA service)
These are not always correct, for example my postcode is noted by them as a grey NGA. For this to be true I should have a minimum speed of 30 Mbps. As many of you know and my neighbours can testify this is just not true. We should be in the White NGA category.
I have already discussed this with Connecting Cheshire some months back, this seems to have fallen on deaf ears.
You can find your postcode here and where you live with regards to NGA criteria *Note, this link opens/downloads an Excel format spreadsheet.
In other news, I hope to have an update on the Gigaloch build in the coming days, the team have been working hard carrying out home installs which I hope to share with you.
As always, any questions please do drop me an email - barmm.uk@gmail.com
Anthony