Council Plans to Cover 10,000 Premises in Perth with Gigabit Broadband

The Perth & Kinross Council (PKC) in central Scotland has announced that they’re seeking “expressions of interest” from suppliers (ISPs and network builders etc.) to help extend the benefits of gigabit-capable broadband connectivity to “nearly” 10,000 homes and business premises across the city.

The plan appears to be based around opening up access to the region’s new Dark Fibre network for other operators to harness. This network was previously deployed by Neos Networks under the UK Government’s state-aid supported Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) programme. The £2m project was part-funded by the Tay Cities Deal.

The LFFN project in central and western Perth connected 34 public sector buildings, including three Council data centres, and it harnessed some of the Council’s own 10km of duct – originally laid to connect traffic lights and CCTV systems.

However, this network of duct and fibre, extending to over 20km, could also give other network operators the opportunity to gain access to connect local businesses and residential homes to gigabit-capable broadband in a more cost-effective manner. The Council and Neos Networks have reciprocal Indefeasible Rights of Use (IRU) agreements over the use of the duct and fibre for the next 20 years.

Councillor Andrew Parrott said:

“We are committed to making Perth a thriving and dynamic city and having world-class digital connectivity is a key part of this. We are very happy to be working with Neos Networks to open up our respective duct and fibre network infrastructure to the market to enable this to happen.”

Peter Hatherley, Business Services Director at Neos Networks, said:

“We are very pleased to be working with Perth & Kinross Council to extend the network we built last year in Perth to provide a gigabit-capable digital future for the community. With our network and POPs in the area, we are very excited to see the benefits that our deployed full fibre connectivity can bring to the region.”

The idea of harnessing a city’s Dark Fibre network to help support a wider street-by-street deployment of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband technology is nothing new in the UK. We’ve seen operator’s like Cityfibre and VXFIBER (LilaConnect), among others, making similar use of such cables and ducts in other cities before. But this would still require a significant commitment of private funding to actually deliver.

At present Perth is already quite well covered by Virgin Media’s (VMO2) gigabit-capable broadband network and Openreach are slowly growing their full fibre reach into the city, but there’s certainly scope for other operators to get involved. We suspect that as well as those two operators, other players like Cityfibre, Axione etc. will probably want to have a sniff.