Worcestershire and West Yorkshire UK Begin FTTC Broadband Rollouts

The state aid supported £20.75m Superfast Worcestershire and separate £21.96m Superfast West Yorkshire projects in England have today announced the start of their respective deployment phases, with the first local homes and businesses going live with BT’s superfast broadband (FTTC/P) services in each area.

The Worcestershire scheme aims to expand the reach of BT’s “high-speed fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network to 90% of local premises by June 2016, which will benefit an extra 55,000 homes and businesses on top of BT’s existing commercial deployment that can already cover 176,000.

The first areas in Worcestershire to benefit today included 56 businesses on the Enigma Business Park in Malvern and 79 homes in the nearby Leigh Sinton Road area. However it’s worth pointing out that this project may be running a little behind schedule as the first premises were originally supposed to go live in April (here).

Harriett Baldwin, MP for West Worcestershire, said:

“The Enigma Business Park has so many excellent businesses which will benefit from superfast broadband and I would like to thank the county council and BT for making this possible. The Superfast Worcestershire project will upgrade many more homes and businesses to fibre over the coming months and I look forward to celebrating the connection of other cabinets in my constituency.

I continue to urge local people to register their interest in superfast broadband by visiting the Superfast Worcestershire website and ensuring the project managers see where people need better connections most.”

Elsewhere the separate scheme in West Yorkshire, which aims to make the same service available to 97% of local premises by the end of autumn 2015, has also started to connect its first homes on the Old Fountain Brewery housing estate in Halifax. Apparently the West Yorkshire scheme is said to be running “three months ahead of schedule“, although so far as we can tell they seem to be running on-target rather than being ahead of it (here).

Overall around 708,000 premises in West Yorkshire’s project area can expect to gain access to the new service by the end of the development.