Surrey County Council has responded to the Liberal Democrat campaign to improve superfast broadband coverage in Surrey and is seeking to fill in the “holes” in the current superfast broadband coverage in the county.

To action this, the County Council finally undertook the long awaited consultation on the next stage of the superfast broadband Infrastructure rollout in the county during May. The purpose of the public consultation was to confirm the areas which do not have Next Generation Access (“NGA”) broadband infrastructure delivering a service of at least 30Mbps.

For this consultation, the County Council developed its modelling to ensure that the mistakes made in the 2012 modelling process, which have left villages close to our market towns without superfast broadband coverage, were not repeated. This has been achieved as the models have used the lowest level postcode areas for the assessment of superfast broadband speeds as opposed to the wider area served by a particular BT box. It has also identified areas where state intervention to provide superfast broadband infrastructure would be permissible as those areas with superfast broadband speeds below 30Mbps as opposed to below 24Mbps.

In parallel to this public consultation, the County Council also sought an explanation and evidence from service providers explaining any changes to their commercial deployment plans and identifying areas that will be included in the commercial roll-out over the next three years as state intervention to enhance the infrastructure roll-out is not permitted in such areas.

After the consultation was concluded, the County Council completed its analysis of the results and submitted its final proposals for the areas which could receive state aid to support the next deployment of superfast broadband infrastructure to Broadband Delivery UK’s (“BDUK”) National Competence Centre for clearance. This is now expected in the Autumn.

But this will not answer all our superfast broadband issues. Even if areas are cleared by BDUK as areas where the state aid can be provided to subsidise the infrastructure roll-out, any decision as to whether any particular area will areas will benefit from any publicly funded infrastructure deployment will not be made until towards the end of the year when BT’s deployment modelling has been assessed and the opportunity and extent of value for money deployment that can be fully funded by Superfast Surrey has been determined.

In addition, superfast broadband will still not achieve particularly superfast speeds in many areas. Despite identifying all areas that do not receive a service of at least 30Mbps, the County Council is only looking to help build new superfast broadband infrastructure where there is the greatest need for improvement … those areas where existing broadband speeds are less than 15Mbps …. which is hardly a superfast broadband service.