The iNorthumberland programme in England has this week celebrated the completion of their first Broadband Deliver UK contract, which has expanded the availability of BT’s “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network to more than 52,500 extra homes and businesses in the county.

Overall a total of 146,000 premises (this includes BT’s separate commercial roll-out) in the county now have access to faster FTTC/P based broadband services and a little over 90% of local premises should thus be able to take a “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) connection, which rises to 95% if you include sub-24Mbps FTTC areas.

The news is positive, although we should point out that the contract originally promised to deliver this coverage by December 2015 and has instead ended 6 months later than planned. On the other hand that’s not too bad considering the complexity of such a roll-out and the fact that there was a fair bit of rural focused ultrafast 330Mbps FTTP involved (e.g. Rothbury).

Work is now underway on a second extension contract worth £4.1m (this is on top of the £18.9m already invested), which aims to superfast broadband to 95% of local premises by the end of 2017 and this should benefit around 3,700 additional premises.

On that front we’ve already revealed a full list of the first areas to benefit from Phase 2  and this looks set to be based around a taxpayer subsidy limit of £1,700 per household (i.e. the costs increase as deployments focus on increasingly isolated and smaller rural communities).