Press release -
Community scheme brings high-speed fibre broadband to Derbyshire villages
A new partnership involving local residents is set to make ultrafast fibre broadband available to homes in Ladder Hill, near Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire.
They’ve joined forces with Openreach, the local network business which is part of BT Group, to get the latest Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) technology capable of delivering ultrafast speeds up to one gigabit per second (Gbps). The high-speed service will be available within 12 months and residents will have a choice of service providers.
Mark Mullett, who led the local community group to campaign for faster broadband, said: “Since I moved here in 2012 we have been trying to manage with speeds of around 1Mbps, but soon things will be a lot easier when we can take advantage of ultrafast speeds. We’ll be able to Skype family members; keep the children entertained online with games and kids tv; stream entertainment services like Netflix and run our businesses from home much more efficiently. That’s all pretty impressive when you’re high on a hill in Derbyshire!”
The scheme is one of a number of Derbyshire projects where Openreach is working directly with local communities to help improve rural broadband. Other examples are at Buxton Sterndale and Langley Mill.
Buxton resident, Jamie Stafford, who helped lead the community campaign there, said: “We typically get low single figure download speeds, which makes it difficult to work from home, play games online, or to use the internet for homework. If we’re planning to watch a film on Saturday night, we’ll start downloading it when we go to bed the night before. To know that will take a matter of minutes when fibre broadband arrives is exciting and we’re looking forward to joining the 21st century.”
Steve Haines, managing director for next generation access at Openreach, said: “It’s great to be able to work with communities across Derbyshire to find a broadband solution. Partnerships like this help us to bring high-speed connections to challenging areas that broadband providers struggle to upgrade alone.
“More than 92 per cent of the UK 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 projects across the UK, with more than 300 contracts signed to date, working in partnership with business and residential communities to deliver faster speeds from a wide choice of competing service providers.”
The Openreach network offers wholesale fibre broadband access to all communications providers under the same prices, terms and conditions, so local households and businesses have a choice of many competing services from more than a hundred different providers.
For more information on community fibre partnerships with BT, visit www.communityfibre.bt.com
Categories
- community fibre partnership
- openreach
- derbyshire
- east midlands
Regions
- Derbyshire
About Openreach
Openreach is Britain’s digital network business.
We’re 30,400 people who connect homes, mobile phone masts, schools, shops, banks, hospitals, libraries, broadcasters, governments and businesses - large and small - to the world.
Our mission is to build the best possible network, with the highest quality service, making sure that everyone in Britain can be connected.
We work on behalf of more than 580 communications providers like SKY, TalkTalk, Vodafone, and BT, and our fibre broadband network is the biggest in the UK, passing more than 26.5 million premises. We’re also the platform for Britain’s thriving digital economy, which is the largest in the G20.
We’re working hard to give people the speeds they need to run and enjoy their daily lives. Over the last decade, we’ve invested more than £11 billion into our network and we now manage more than 158 million kilometres of cable stretching from Scotland to Cornwall, from Wales to the east coast. And we’re continuing to take that network further - making superfast broadband speeds available to thousands more homes and businesses every week.
Openreach is a wholly owned and independently governed division of the BT Group, and it is a highly regulated business, with more than 90 per cent of our revenues generated from services that are regulated by Ofcom.
Any company can access our products under exactly the same prices, terms and conditions.
For the year ended 31 March 2017, we reported revenues of £5.1bn.
For more information, visitopenreach.co.uk
BT Regions