Connecting Shropshire Public Consultation Results

Posted: 7^th November 2016

The outcome of Connecting Shropshire’s State Aid public consultation has been published on the Connecting Shropshire website

Following responses from stakeholders, the following key principles have been accommodated in the tender specification:

• Priority will be given to supplier broadband solutions that serve premises on the slowest speeds (<15Mbps), with the highest weighting for premises on download speeds of below 2Mbps;
• Broadband solutions for premises registered for business rates will be weighted more favourably;
• To encourage competition from smaller suppliers, there will be two Lot areas;
• To realise economies of scale, we can aggregate the two contracts should the same supplier win both tender Lots;
• The assessment of the suppliers’ solution design will be technologically neutral to comply with the State Aid decision notice;
• As part of the evaluation process, suppliers will need to consider coverage of whole communities and isolated premises;
• The evaluation process has been weighted to accommodate coverage at the lowest Next Generation Access (NGA) speed of 30Mbps rather than incentivise suppliers to provide solutions of 100Mbps+;
• There will be no priority given to any geographic area;
• A contingency sum of money will be included in the contracts to provide match-funding for community solutions, where there is no projected coverage planned in the winning bids;
• There is a contingency sum, which could be used to cover any ‘under review’ premises that aren’t provided to within the next 3 years.

We remain committed to launching the procurement during the coming months.

Web: http://connectingshropshire.co.uk/

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