It has emerged that BT quoted over half a million pounds to provide a remote Welsh village with a working broadband connection. But the UK carrier has defended the price, saying it was one of a number of options for the location.
BT had initally quoted a cost of £550,000 to install a copper-based broadband link to connect the village of Erbistock, which has just 80 homes and is connected to the Bangor-on-Dee telephone exchange, located approximately 5 miles away.
Unsurprsingly, the staggeringly high cost quoted by BT caused villagers to look at other options.
“We can’t get broadband in Erbistock because we’re too far away from the BT exchange,” Alison Fletcher, 50, who was behind the community’s five-year campaign to get online, told the BBC. “When BT came back saying it was going to cost more than half a million [pounds] for them to help us, and that we would have to fund this cost, we started looking at other options.”
They discovered that Rutland Telecom had provided the village of Lyddington, with a superfast broadband connection earlier in the year.
Speaking to the BBC, Rutland Telecom managing director David Lewis said that Rutland would upgrade the copper links from the exchange to the street cabinet with optical fibre, and would provide a VDSL2 service from the cabinet to homes.
Erbistock residents should be online by October.
To help residents pay for the £50,000 installation cost, the village is lobbying for a government grant from the Welsh Assembly’s Regional Innovative Broadband Support (RIBS) project. The scheme provides up to £1,000 per household to help them connect to the Internet, and it has so far helped approximately 8,500 premises in Wales to get online since 2006. In June it was announced that BT would help four rural communities get online thanks to the RIBS scheme.
But why was BT quote so expensive for Erbistock?
“My understanding is that the £500,000 plus figure was provided as one of a number of options, and it was the most expensive option as it meant building an entirely new copper network in area, which would have meant major civil engineering works,” a BT spokesman told eWEEK Europe UK.
“That figure was the initial figure given, but there were also significantly cheaper options,” said BT. “We are still exploring alternative solutions for the area.”
“With Rutland, they are not obliged to wholesale their service like BT is,” the BT spokeswoman said. “So they can therefore guarantee a return on their investment, because they effectively create a local monopoly. But for us it is more of a challenge, as we can’t guarantee our retail arm will benefit from the investment.”
A number of solutions are being examined by service providers to roll out broadband to remote locations. For example, in July Virgin Media announced it was installing fibre cables over electricity poles to the residents of the Welsh village of Crumlin, Caerphilly. But not all utility companies are playing ball, as i3’s Fibrecity found out when it tried to install a fibre network using the sewer system of Wessex Water in Bournemouth.
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Sadly it seems BT didn't say what other options it proposed and neither do they define "significantly cheaper". For example, £400k might be "significantly cheaper" but it would still be ridiculously expensive. There is no basis for comparison, other than what already exists.