Alverton residents praise full fibre reliability after upgrade!

More than 25 homes in the Nottinghamshire village of Alverton are enjoying a huge boost to the reliability and speed of their broadband, thanks to a determined campaign by local resident, Phil Worville.

Frustrated with slow speeds and an unreliable wireless service that often left them using a 4G connection to work from home, Phil brought the community together in an ambitious partnership involving Openreach, Nottinghamshire County Council, and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport.

They applied for government vouchers, and secured funding from the county council to raise enough money to work with Openreach to build a new ultrafast full fibre broadband network.

With download speeds of up to 1 Gbps available, full fibre is around 16 times faster than the average home broadband connection.

For those working from home this means better connectivity, faster download and upload speeds, better quality video calls and higher resolution streaming.

Outside of working hours, full fibre provides better gaming, being able to stream live sports and films quickly in 4K/UHD, as well as using multiple devices across the family, all at the same time.

Alverton resident, Phil Worville, said: “The arrival of full fibre has made such a difference. Nobody really thought it was possible and we’d been struggling with slow speeds and unreliable broadband for some time. It made working from home difficult and we knew we had to do something.

“When you’re working from home as I do, reliability is the most important thing. If you have connection issues, then you’re left with little choice but to return to the office or find somewhere else to work. This isn’t always possible, such as during the Covid years, when it was incredibly stressful for many trying to juggle working from home and home schooling, when we had a slow and unreliable service.

“Everyone is thrilled with full fibre. I’m a Technical Engineer for Philips, which means I work with huge files daily. Being able to transfer this data, and knowing the connection is stable, is important to me. And in the evenings, being able to stream live 4K sports enables me to follow football games from both home and abroad without any drop in performance or impact on the rest of the household.

“The Openreach engineers that built the network were great. They worked quickly and with the minimum of disruption to make the service available to us. We’re grateful for all their hard work and it’s probably had a positive impact on the long-term attractiveness of where we live, and maybe even the house prices.”

Openreach is building full fibre faster, at lower cost and higher quality than anyone else in the UK.

In Alverton, engineers had to install around 5 kilometres of new fibre cable, stretching from nearby Whatton, to build the new network. It was a challenging build, which took a huge amount of planning and hard work from engineers to make it happen. The work took around five months to complete,

Kasam Hussain, Openreach’s regional director for the East Midlands, said: “We all know how important it is for homes and businesses to have fast and reliable broadband. From running a business, working from home, or doing homework – so much is done online.

“Across Nottinghamshire, more than 125,000 homes and businesses now have access to our full fibre network and that number is increasing all the time. Watch out for our engineers working in Bingham, Burton Joyce and Lowdham during the next few months.”

Nottinghamshire County Councillor Keith Girling, Cabinet Member for Economic Development and Asset Management said: “We’re proud that Nottinghamshire is already one of the best-connected counties in the country as we know how vital it is for our economy.

“It’s great that Alverton has received an upgrade to full-fibre broadband and that we used the Nottinghamshire top-up scheme to help get this funded.  

“Reliable, good quality internet access is essential for the way we work, learn and communicate.”

Openreach’s work to build and connect customers to full fibre is on track to reach 25 million homes and businesses by December 2026.

More than 1,600 Openreach people live and work in the East Midlands and recent research by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) estimated a £3.5 billion boost from connecting everyone in the region to full fibre.

This short video explains what full fibre technology is and you can find out more about latest availability and local plans here.