Internet services

Tender description

Cheshire East Borough Council, on behalf of the Connecting Cheshire Partnership including, Cheshire West and Chester and Warrington Borough Councils, intends to procure a supplier or consortium to extend the availability of Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband infrastructure. The procurement aims to provide coverage to a set of nominated premises (both businesses and residential) across the region where there is currently no provision of broadband with speeds greater than 30 Mbps, described as Not Spot areas. As a technology agnostic deployment, the project will support investment in the most cost effective and sustainable solutions available, providing open access wholesale broadband services. There will be an emphasis on connecting businesses and homes in our most rural and remote areas. Following engagement with the telecommunications market, an Intervention Area of 28,717 NGA white premises has been identified. The priority is to ensure that the public funding is used most effectively to provide a step change in performance for those businesses and residential premises that currently have speeds of less than 24Mbps. Currently 18,449 have been identified in this category and are in scope of this procurement, and we will look to prioritise premises in more rural locations of sub-region. The funding for this project is considered as State aid and its use in this procurement will be approved by Broadband Delivery UK's National Competence Centre under the 2016 National Broadband Scheme for the UK (2016 NBS), a European Commission approved aid Scheme. The intention is to use a gap funding model, where the assets remain in perpetuity with the private sector, mitigating public sector risk and ensuring full integration with existing NGA networks.