Gloucestershire and Herefordshire Reveal H1 2015 Fibre Broadband Upgrades

It’s been awhile since we ran any coverage on the £56.6m Fastershire project (still the best name ever), which aims to make BT’s “fibre broadband” (FTTC/P) network available to around 90% of premises in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire by the end of 2016 (148,000 premises). But the good news is that we now have the roll-out plan for the first half of 2015.

According to the Fastershire website, so far some 44,089 local homes and businesses in both counties are now able to connect to “fibre“, with 300kms of cable ducts laid and 250kms of fibre optic cable deployed. On top of that 38 telephone exchanges and 173 street cabinets have been upgraded.

However the latest roll-out update appears to focus primarily on upgrades for Herefordshire, which is anticipated to have 20,000 premises upgraded to the new service by Summer 2015 (55,000 if you include the existing commercial coverage of fibre broadband connectivity).

Fastershire H1 – 2015 Rollout (Herefordshire)

Bridge Sollars
Bromyard
Burley Gate
Canon Pyon
Fownhope
Harewood End
Holme Lacy
How Caple
Madley
Michaelchurch
Pencombe
Peterchurch
Pontrilas
Skenfrith
St Weonards
Sutton St Nicholas
Tarrington
Trumpet
Weobley
Wormbridge
Wormelow.

Infill (Expanding Coverage in Existing Areas)
Carey
Gorsley
Lea
Ross-on-Wye
Symonds Yat

It’s worth noting that some of the areas, such as Peterchurch, have until recently only been able to get a decent (if still somewhat slow) broadband service by signing up to Allpay Broadband‘s local fixed wireless broadband network. Sadly that ISP doesn’t appear to have enhanced itself much over the years and continues to offer speeds of just 2Mbps.

The longer term aspiration for Fastershire is to make “superfast” speeds of 24Mbps+ available to 100% by 2018 and new contracts are currently being discussed to help facilitate that.