29
January
2018
|
16:00
Europe/Amsterdam

South Gloucestershire plays leading role in Britain achieving 95 per cent superfast broadband target

Summary
​South Gloucestershire was praised today for playing a leading role in Great Britain achieving the target of 95 per cent superfast broadband coverage.

South Gloucestershire was praised today for playing a leading role in Great Britain achieving the target of 95 per cent superfast broadband coverage.

The county has already surpassed the national average and reached 95.6 per cent coverage with about 107,893 households and businesses having access to superfast speeds of 24Mbps and above – and the numbers are continuing to grow.

Access to superfast broadband across South Gloucestershire continues to increase, largely thanks to Openreach’s commercial rollout and our multi-million pound partnership with the county council.

Emma Howarth, programme director in the South West for Openreach, which employs more than 3,000 engineers and other workers in the region, said:“This is a great day for both the country and for South Gloucestershire. For a number of years, South Gloucestershire has led the way with the roll-out of this exciting technology, which is providing a major boost for the economy.

We have some of the highest superfast coverage figures of any county, which is a tribute to the hard work of our engineers in South Gloucestershire and the success of the programme. The multi million pound scheme has been part of one of the largest and most complex engineering projects in the country over recent years and it’s a great example of the public and private sectors working effectively together.

“We have managed to bring new services to areas which fall outside the private sector’s commercial programme and we’re determined to go further. Openreach is continuing to work with its public sector partners, including South Gloucestershire Council, to get faster broadband to even more locations.”

Nationally, Openreach chief executive Clive Selley today recognised the “huge contribution” of more than 9,300 Openreach people across the UK following a Government announcement that 95 per cent of the country can now order superfast broadband speeds of at least 24 Megabits per second (Mbps). Openreach has rolled out more than 35 million kilometres of fibre optic cables in an initiative taking more than 145 million man hours.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport revealed today that it had reached its national target of making superfast broadband available to 95 per cent of the country. This means the vast majority of Britain’s homes and businesses can now order services capable of streaming their favourite Netflix or iPlayer shows, playing online games, responding to emails and surfing the web – all simultaneously, on multiple devices and without interruption.

As the UK’s largest digital infrastructure provider, Openreach now offers wholesale fibre broadband services to more than 27.1 million British homes and businesses, making up the lion’s share of the total national footprint, with the firm having invested more than £11 billion over the last decade to upgrade and expand its network nationwide.

Openreach engineers are still working hard to address the remaining not-spots in partnership with government, local authorities and communities, and to deliver the next generation of ultrafast broadband technologies across the country. The business is currently consulting with its wholesale customers on how to achieve its ambition of making ultrafast (100Mbps+) Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology available to 10 million premises by the mid-2020s, and it will be publishing an update on this process in the near future.

Clive Selley, said: “Everyone at Openreach is determined to deliver decent broadband speeds to every home and business in Britain. That is our mission, and we won’t be happy until every property from Land’s End to John O’Groats has access to decent speeds. But today represents an important milestone in this mission, and it’s important for me to recognise the huge contribution of our engineers and planners in what has been a titanic and complex engineering project.

“More than 27 million homes have been upgraded since 2009, and the UK now enjoys faster speeds, and broader coverage than all of the major EU economies. I’m proud that Openreach people have played the leading role in one of Britain’s great, unsung engineering achievements.”

He added that Openreach wanted to “get on with the job of delivering better broadband to everybody in Britain” and to build “a future-proof, large-scale full fibre network that will reinforce Britain’s position as a leading digital economy in the world”.