Warwickshire hamlet to benefit from new multi-million pound national scheme to bring high-speed broadband to more rural businesses
A partnership between Openreach, the UK government and local businesses will enable people living and working in the tiny community of Stareton to get some of the fastest broadband speeds in the country.
People living and working in the tiny Warwickshire hamlet of Stareton are to benefit from a new multi-million pound scheme to help more of the UK’s small and medium businesses get access to high-speed broadband.
Four businesses in Stareton have been awarded grants totalling £12,000 by the UK Government’s new Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme. It provides grants of up to £3,000 per small or medium business towards installation costs.
As a result, NortonDuff Ltd, JoMoto Limited, Paul Charles Renovations and Deeprlearn Ltd and six households in the hamlet are now looking forward to getting some of the fastest broadband speeds in the country.
They chose to partner with Openreach, the business responsible for Britain’s largest telephone and broadband network, through its Community Fibre Partnerships programme.
Engineers from Openreach, which will also make a substantial investment in the Stareton project, will install Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) technology, capable of delivering ultrafast download speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) and upload speeds of up to 220 megabits per second (Mbps).
Dr Malcolm Strens, founder of deeprlearn.com, said: “Because of our distance from the exchange, affordable options for individual properties were virtually non-existent, so we got together as a community to look for the best way forward.
“We knew about Openreach’s Community Fibre Partnerships programme, but when we heard through the City Council that Coventry and Warwickshire is piloting the new Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme, everything came together.
“The community chose Openreach for our main provision because their network is ‘open’, giving us a choice of fibre broadband providers.
“This time next year we should have some of the fastest internet speeds in the country, after being stuck in the ‘slow lane’ with speeds below 2Mbps, making life very difficult for both businesses and residents.
“For local high-tech businesses like deeprlearn.com, which builds artificial intelligence on ‘big data’, the ultrafast connections offered by FTTP technology will be invaluable.”
Steve Haines, Openreach’s managing director of next generation access, said: “Rolling out high-speed fibre broadband is a huge and expensive engineering undertaking. Co-funding initiatives, such as the project in Stareton, are an important way of helping us reach even the most remote, smallest communities, which is in addition to our ongoing partnership with the CSW Broadband Project.”
Notes to Editors
Information about Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme is available from: https://gigabitvoucher.culture.gov.uk/
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For more information please contact Emma Tennant on 0800 085 0660 or email: emma.tennant@bt.com
Twitter: @EmmaTennantBT
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