Hampshire County Council has published a map detailing the areas that will benefit from superfast broadband rollout under the government’s scheme and commercial rollout.
The green areas on the map cover locations that will be connected under the Hampshire Broadband Programme by 2015, while the yellow areas show the more remote rural areas that will be connected later, by 2017.
At the moment, Hampshire’s BDUK (Broadband Delivery for the UK) plan will connect 90 per cent of premises to superfast broadband, but the council wants to spend an extra £5 million on connecting 98 per cent of residents.
Read Recombu Digital’s guide to Fibre Broadband and BDUKThe first 90 per cent phase will be completed by 2015, with those in the remaining 8 per cent to be connected over the following two years. Those in the 2 per cent will have to make do with a service providing speeds of at least 2Mbps.
‘Superfast’ as defined by the government is any service that can deliver speeds of over 80Mbps and BT’s FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet) lines will deliver this in the majority of places. Where it is more feasible to deliver FTTP (Fibre to the Cabinet), residents and businesses will benefit from even faster top speeds of 330Mbps.
The map itself doesn’t let you search by street level or let you see where cabinets will be sited, nor does it tell you when areas will start to be connected.
Hampshire County Council says that the map is more of a forecast than something that’s set in stone, mentioning that the project will evolve over time. Trials of technologies like vectoring and G.fast means that speeds over FTTC could increase to 100Mbps and 1Gbps in some areas, which could increase availability of superfast.
For now, the map provides a handy at-a-glance view of the areas which could benefit and will be useful for residents and businesses on the outskirts of places like Andover, Basingstoke, Fareham, Fordingbridge, Ringwood and Winchester.
Rural ISPs looking to serve the rural 2 per cent with a service that’s better than 2Mbps will find it less useful. Councils have been asked to reveal the extent of their broadband plans to allow competition to flourish in the margins where BDUK plans won’t deliver superfast connections.
While we were able to locate one not spot in the map, near the village of Buriton, it’s unlikely that ISPs like Gigaclear and Kijoma will find this data useful.
To see the full map in PDF form click here.
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