Frampton Cotterell Focus Team

Focus on Frampton Cotterell, Coalpit Heath, Iron Acton, Rangeworthy, Tytherington and the surrounding areas Learn more

Broadband update

by Claire Young on 12 April, 2019

There are still people struggling with slow broadband, including in Rangeworthy, Henfield and The Meads in Frampton Cotterell.

We have raised all these cases with the council official responsible for the Broadband UK scheme. He says:

The broadband programme has been running for some years now and as a result of this, over time, third party suppliers have/had been delivering to our intervention area (e.g. Virgin on demand), This drives a need to adjust the broadband contract and scope to remove premises that have received faster broadband. The descope activity is being reviewed currently in terms of the original scope of work. The descope activity is targeted to complete end April / mid May.

The programme will be looking to fill the “gaps” with premises that were originally not in scope. At present we do not have a view of how many of these premises we can bring into the scope as this will depend on the outcome of the state aid rules / Value For Money rules and ultimately how much budget is available as a result of the descoping activity.  (This does not mean additional budget, rather utilising the budget freed up from the descoping activity)

The re-scope (filling the “gaps”) activity is targeted/estimated to complete end May / June time.  

It is important to remember that proposed changes to the scope will still have to follow the same state aid rules and validation around funding that the programme has followed since it’s inception.

Once approved, this will produce a revised scope for the Phase 3 stage of the broadband programme and we will be communicating to residents/Parishes/Councillors at this point.

Essentially he is saying that some homes and businesses that were due to have public money spent on them have now got broadband commercially. The money that would have been spent on them could now be spent on others where until now there have been no plans to provide fast broadband.

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