11 Apr Half way mark for Superfast Surrey fibre broadband partnership
Superfast Surrey, a partnership between Surrey County Council and BT, announced that it has now reached the half way mark of its fibre broadband roll-out programme across the county. Thanks to the Superfast Surrey project, cabinets serving around 42,000 homes and businesses across the county have been connected to the high-speed technology.
In the latest stage of the roll-out Superfast Surrey also announced that the first green cabinet to bring fibre broadband access to 520 homes and businesses in the village of Virginia Water is now live and customers will be able to place orders from next week. More homes and businesses in the village will also be able to benefit, as fibre broadband becomes available across the area over the next few weeks, with connection speeds of up to 80Mbps available.
Superfast Surrey aims to reach 84,000 premises which fall outside the private sector’s commercial plans including those of BT which has already made the technology available to more than 390,000 Surrey homes and businesses. The partnership, alongside BT’s commercial roll out, aims to bring fibre broadband to over 99 per cent of the county’s homes and businesses by the end of 2014 with a focus on the more rural, difficult to reach areas.
Peter Martin, Surrey County Council’s Deputy Leader, said: “This is great news and confirms we’re well on the way to making Surrey the best connected county in the country by the end of the year. The benefits are significant, both economically and socially. Surrey’s economy will be boosted by around £30 million annually and homes will get fast, reliable internet access. We’ll now push on from this milestone to make sure nearly everyone in Surrey enjoys the benefits that high speeds offer.”
Bill Murphy, BT Group’s managing director of next generation access, said: “Today’s announcement is another important milestone for a partnership which is making real progress. Working with our partners, we are able to bring this popular technology to locations where the economics and engineering challenges are that much greater. High-speed fibre broadband is increasingly important if local households and businesses are to make the most of the huge range of opportunities offered by the internet, whether they are seeking to start a new business, find new customers, undertake on-line training or simply wish to browse for entertainment or leisure purposes.”
Engineers for Openreach, BT’s local network business, are building the new fibre broadband infrastructure. Fibre to the Cabinet will be the main technology deployed. This can deliver wholesale downstream speeds of up to **80Mbps, and upstream speeds of up to 20Mbps. Fibre to the Premises technology – delivering ultra-fast wholesale speeds of up to 330Mbps – will also be deployed in certain areas.
The technology will boost the competitiveness of local businesses, helping them to find new customers and operate more efficiently, whilst opening up a host of new learning and development opportunities for households.
People using fibre broadband are able to use multiple bandwidth-hungry applications at the same time and send and receive large amounts of data much more quickly and efficiently. New fibre services are set to transform the way households use the internet, from the simple sharing of pictures and video and on-line training and research to enjoying the growing boom in entertainment services available on-line.
For local businesses, the fibre network will underpin the introduction of many new services and applications. Big business applications driven by new ‘cloud’ services will be within the reach of enterprises of all sizes. Computer back up, storage and processing will be faster, and the use of high-quality videoconferencing will become viable.