Crowdfunding appeal brings high-speed broadband to community

People living in a new housing development near Giffnock are set for a major broadband boost - thanks to a superfast crowdfunding appeal and Openreach’s Community Fibre Partnership scheme.

Glenmill resident Nav Sadiq used the crowdfunding service Spacehive – which raises cash for projects that improve local environments – to raise the money needed to co-fund the project with Openreach within a week.

More than 300 Glenmill households will benefit when engineers from Openreach, Scotland’s digital network business, install the new network using Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology at speeds of up to 80Mbps. Nav took on the project on behalf of the community because having access to high-speed broadband will make a huge difference to everyone there.

He said: “We have multiple people who work remotely, have professional lives and have families - and having access to fibre, for a variety of reasons, is crucial in this day and age. It will mean the world to so many.

“I need a good connection myself, for regular conference calls to the USA. The Community Fibre Partnership will alleviate all our issues. The upgrade will serve our community for years to come and bring about the change way before we would ever be scheduled to receive an upgrade.”

Chris Gourlay, Founder and CEO of Spacehive, said: "We're thrilled that Glenmill has managed to smash their funding target at record-breaking speed. It's exciting to see more and more communities across the UK working with Spacehive and Openreach to quickly raise the funding they need to install superfast fibre broadband locally."

Robert Thorburn, Openreach partnership director for Scotland, said: “It’s great that we’ve been able to work with the Glenmill community to find a broadband solution and I congratulate Naz and the residents on their phenomenal success with Spacehive, becoming our fastest-yet community fibre fundraisers. This is a real template for what can be achieved.

“Partnerships like this help us to bring high-speed connections to those areas that, for many reasons, broadband providers struggle to upgrade alone. More than 90 per cent of Scotland can access superfast speeds today, and we’re committed to making fibre broadband as widely available as possible.

“That’s why we’re investing in hundreds of similar community projects across the UK, working in partnership with businesses, schools and residential communities to deliver faster speeds available from a wide choice of competing service providers.”

The Community Fibre Partnershipscheme is designed to help people in places not included in any current roll-out plans to bring fibre broadband to their local area, working with Openreach to co-fund the installation. If a local school benefits from the project, communities can also benefit from a BT Group grant that will cover up to 75 per cent of the cost, capped at £30,000.

Once the network is in place, typically within 12 months, communities have access to a wide range of providers who offer their services over the Openreach network, bringing competition and choice.

Fibre broadband makes activities like streaming music, watching TV online and uploading large files much quicker, as well as enabling several members of a household or place of work to be online at once.

Across the UK, more than 350 CFP schemes have already been agreed, with more than 150 communities already able to benefit from faster internet speeds when they order services from a provider of their choice.

ENDS

Notes to editors

Crowdfunding is based on the idea that a number of people can split the cost of something – in this case fibre broadband – with multiple people contributing.

Openreach engineer James McGovern and Glenmill community fibre campaigner Nav Sadiq.

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Openreach is Britain’s digital network business. That means we connect homes, mobile phone masts, schools, shops, banks, hospitals, libraries, broadcasters, governments and businesses – large and small – to the world. It’s our mission to build the best possible network with the highest quality service, and make sure that everyone in Britain can be connected.

Our 30,400 people work on behalf of more than 580 communications providers like Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and BT. Our fibre broadband network is the biggest in the UK, covering more than 26.8 million premises. And our technology is the basis of Britain’s thriving digital economy, which is the largest of the G20 countries.

We’re working hard to give people the broadband speeds they need at work and at home. Over the last decade, we’ve invested more than £11bn into our network. And we now manage more than 158 million kilometres of cable stretching from Scotland to Cornwall, and from Wales to the east coast. But we’re not stopping there – we’re making superfast broadband speeds available to thousands more homes and businesses every week.

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