First ultra-fast broadband city in Britain
SALISBURY today became the first city in the UK to have universal access to ultra-fast fibre broadband.
Openreach, the division of BT that looks after cables and wires, has built out the network across the entire historic cathedral city in Wiltshire in just under a year so that Fibreto-the-Premises (FTTP) technology is available to 20,000 households and businesses.
This is far faster and more reliable than old-style copper connections, which are often affected by the weather.
The FTTP network could help the UK economy recover from coronavirus because it could enable thousands more people to work remotely and to start businesses from home.
a study by economic consultancy, the Centre for Economics & Business Research, found that connecting the south west of England to full fibre broadband over the next five years would provide a £4.3bn boost to the economy.
James Tappenden, the Openreach director who led the project, said the roll- out of FTTP will create thousands of jobs. ‘These will be direct new roles for engineers but also there will be indirect jobs because there is a massive supply chain,’ he said.
‘We will need vehicles, cables, even telegraph poles.’ He added that 2.7m households and business premises have full fibre now, and that Openreach has a target of 4.5m by the end of March, and 20m by the mid to late 2020s, or around two-thirds of UK households.
Earlier this week CityFibre, the country’s third largest digital infrastructure platform, announced it was creating 10,000 jobs to boost its rollout of fibre.
Openreach invested £10m in the salisbury project, which posed some unique challenges because of the world-renowned architecture.
salisbury has also been the site for testing ways to move the old analogue phone network to a new digital service so voice calls are also carried over the same fibre cables as the broadband, instead of the traditional copper wires.
so far only 800 homes have upgraded to the service. From december, households upgrading or changing their broadband will only be able to take a full-fibre product as copper is phased out.