Wellington to benefit from broadband speed boost
BT today announced that homes and businesses in Wellington will have access to super-fast fibre broadband by the end of next year.
Around 17,000 homes in the area should be able to take advantage of fibre broadband as part of a £2.5 billion roll-out.
Donnington is currently the only Shropshire telephone exchange to receive the super-fast broadband, the upgraded exchange went live at the beginning of this month.
Residents in Dawley, Newport, Stirchley, Shrewsbury (not Harlescott), Baschurch, Donnington and Oswestry will see the their telephone exchanges enabled for fast broadband in March 2012.
Super-fast broadband, using ‘fibre to street cabinet’ technology (FTTC), offers much faster download speeds of up to 40Mbps, these will roughly double in 2012. The business has also launched a much faster variant in certain locations that will offer speeds of up to 300Mbps in Spring 2012.
BT’s local network business Openreach expects to make super-fast fibre broadband available to two thirds of the UK by the end of 2015 in the biggest single investment in super-fast broadband ever undertaken in this country.
More than six million homes and businesses already have access.
Olivia Garfield, CEO of Openreach, said: “We continue to make tremendous strides with our fibre programme. Super-fast broadband is already within reach of more than six million premises today and we are on track to pass ten million premises next year.
“Our ambitions do not stop there. We will make fibre available to two thirds of UK premises by the end of 2014 2 and we want to go even further. It is important that as many premises as possible have access to fibre and so we will bid for the BDUK 3 funds that are available. Our experience in deploying fibre networks at scale and the fact that our open, wholesale network allows competition to thrive in an area makes Openreach an ideal partner for these local/regional broadband initiatives.”
