Fibre broadband making a huge difference in Northamptonshire
The number of Northamptonshire homes and businesses able to get fibre broadband now stands at more than a quarter of a million, says BT’s East Midlands regional partnerships director Paul Bimson.
Our partnership with the county council via the Superfast Northamptonshire project, has already made fibre broadband available to more than 64,000 properties. That’s in addition to our commercial rollout which has reached 186,000 premises.
There’s plenty more to come. A second Superfast Northamptonshire contract signed 18 months ago is already starting to make a difference. By December next year it will have given a further 23,900 homes and businesses the ability to switch to fibre broadband.
Across the East Midlands, the number of premises currently able to access the fibre broadband network rises to 1.8 million households, with around 420,000 already having signed up to a fibre package.
And because the new broadband network is being rolled out by Openreach, BT’s local network business, people can still choose their own broadband package from a wide range of internet service providers. They are not limited to just one company.
Hundreds of BT people and contractors are working on this huge rollout. It’s an enormous engineering task but one we know is making a big difference to homes and businesses across the county.
In recent weeks, fibre broadband has reached areas including Bozeat, Kingsthorpe and Corby. Coming soon are Cotterstock and Duddington.
Fibre broadband, with download speeds of up to 80Mbps in most areas, helps make everything happen faster than a standard broadband connection.
At 50Mbps, a music album will take roughly 16 seconds to download, compared to more than three minutes on a 4Mbps connection. A high-quality film will take around four minutes to download on a 50Mbps fibre connection, compared to 50 minutes on a standard 4Mbps connection.
Powering this broadband transformation is our people. Over the past 18 months, we’ve announced new apprenticeships and graduate opportunities in the region. And of our 4,000 BT employees working in the East Midlands, around 460 of them are based here in Northamptonshire.
An independent report last year also shows the company generates a massive £83 million for the Northamptonshire economy.
Across the UK, thousands of engineers hired by Openreach are helping to fix faults and install new lines faster; and a new ‘view my engineer’ service provides text progress updates, as well as the engineer’s name and phone number ahead of any appointment.
As BT’s digital journey continues during 2016 and beyond, what people and businesses do with their high-speed broadband and other new technologies will be limited only by their imagination.
The latest BT news is available at www.btplc.com and for information about the Superfast Northamptonshire project visit www.superfastnorthamptonshire.net.
