YES: BT’s general manager for the South East Andrew Campling

IN Oxfordshire, we have more than 175,000 homes and businesses that already have access to fibre broadband. They span across 19 exchange areas including Abingdon, Cowley, Banbury and Witney. This is due to BT’s commercial fibre broadband roll-out in the county. BT is also investing £2.5bn on a commercial basis to make fibre broadband available to around 19 million UK premises by the end of Spring 2014.

In an announcement earlier this month, Oxfordshire County Council awarded a multi-million-pound contract to BT, marking the start of a two-and-a-half year programme to bring better broadband to thousands more homes and businesses in the county.

The Better Broadband for Oxfordshire programme will make superfast broadband available to more than 64,000 homes and businesses across the county by its completion.

The £25m programme is made up of £10m from the council, £4m from the Government (BDUK, Broadband Delivery UK) and £11m from BT.

It builds on the existing commercial footprint in the county with the aim that at least 90 per cent of all premises will have access to superfast broadband speeds of 24Mbps and above, by the end of 2015.

Openreach, BT’s local network business, is using a mix of fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) and fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies. Both technologies offer speeds many times faster than the current UK average, reported by the regulator Ofcom to be 14Mbps. FTTC, where fibre is delivered to new street cabinets, offers download speeds of up to 80Mbps and upload speeds of up to 20Mbps.

We believe that high-speed access will help the local economy thrive, allowing Oxfordshire businesses to grow, attracting inward investment, creating jobs and stimulating growth. It will also provide new online learning and development opportunities for local people.

Openreach engineers will soon begin surveying locations around the county and analysing the best way to roll out the network. Work will begin in early 2014. Due to the current network topography and the economics of deployment, it is likely that some premises within selected exchange areas will not initially be able to access fibre-based broadband. Openreach is considering alternative solutions for these locations.

The new fibre-based network will be open to all communications providers on an equivalent basis.

There are more than 80 service providers currently offering or using fibre services over BT’s network in the UK.

NO: Northmoor parish council chairman Graham Shelton

THE Government plan to roll out rural broadband was ill-conceived right from the beginning because they never took account of how they would connect up the remaining locations which aren’t covered by the project.

Now the areas which aren’t in the 90 per cent or so which will benefit are virtually unconnectable because they are all in tiny little pockets.

I think BT has a huge conflict of interest between satisfying its shareholders and satisfying the Government.

It’s a conflict of interest because BT is a huge private company which needs to make as much money as it possibly can for its shareholders.

That’s its role, and yet it’s being asked by the Government to connect as many properties as it can.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport was quite clear that with this roll-out, BT was charged with achieving best value for money, but the result of that is that they connect the 90 per cent but leave the rest of the areas virtually unconnectable.

We are very fortunate in Northmoor because we realised this was going to happen two years ago and we put in an expression of interest to the Rural Community Broadband Fund, which was approved.

Then everything stopped, because we were told they couldn’t give out money until the main roll-out had been decided. But now it has been announced BT is going to do it, we can make our full application and we expect that to be approved in the autumn.

We are applying for in the region of £150,000 to £160,000 and we have the support of West Oxfordshire District Council to run a procurement process to find a private company to provide match funding.

But we’ve only been lucky because some people in the village were far-sighted and knowledgeable enough to foresee the problems.