Rural Herefordshire Villages Celebrate Arrival of 330Mbps FTTP Broadband

Several remote rural villages in Herefordshire (England), which include Llangarron and the nearby villages of Llancloudy and Llangrove, look set to become some of the first in the county to benefit from the arrival of a new ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network that will offer top speeds of 330Mbps (Megabits per second).

Last year we covered a number of reports concerning how BTOpenreach, which in related areas is working alongside the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme (note: in Herefordshire this project is called Fastershire), was also deploying ultrafast pure fibre optic FTTP technology into a growing number of remote rural villages.

In most cases Openreach prefers to roll-out their slower and less reliable ‘up to’ 80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) service, but on some occasions it can actually be more cost effectively to deploy the normally quite expensive FTTP solution instead.

Luckily some 450 premises in the three villages now look set to be among the lucky areas that can get a full FTTP service, which BT has already indicated could soon see its top download speeds boosted to 1000Mbps (pending the outcome of future trials). The performance is a big improvement over the average of 3Mbps that locals currently claim to receive.

Graham Powell, Herefordshire County Councillor, said:

“What we’re doing in Llangarron illustrates the strides we’re making in the county to deliver a fibre network that will make a massive difference to the whole of Herefordshire.”

Ian Binks, BT’s Regional Manager for Herefordshire, said:

“It’s fitting that this historic parish, with links to the Anglo Saxon times of Edward the Confessor, is now making its own bit of digital history a thousand years on. Fastershire is a huge engineering operation and our project teams are working hard to bring faster fibre broadband to more communities as quickly as possible.”

It should be said that plenty more areas across the United Kingdom are also being upgraded to support FTTP, although we won’t be writing a story for all of those (there are far too many); but there is a lot more work occurring at this end than some people may think.

Meanwhile the overall Fastershire project 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) and an extension to this will shortly be signed in order to push the coverage even further.

The new service for the above villages is set to go live this spring 2015.