£62k from Worcestershire Council Helps Bring FTTP Broadband to Charlton
Some 235 premises in the village of Charlton can finally access gigabit broadband speeds after the Worcestershire County Council (WCC) in England committed £62k towards Openreach’s (BT) project to build a new Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network in the area, which helped to “top up” with funding provided via the UK’s previous gigabit voucher scheme (RGC).
The full cost of the roll-out, including any contributions from Openreach or the gigabit voucher scheme itself, is not known, but we suspect it’ll be a fair bit more than £62k (we think it’d probably cost at least double). The extra funding formed part of WCC’s wider investment pot of up to an additional £2.1m, which is being used for similar projects across the county.
The national RGC programme has, so far, supported a total of over 40 hard-to-reach communities across the county, with Worcestershire also securing over £7m of additional external funding, to help make faster and more reliable broadband available to around 5,500 premises.
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Councillor Marc Bayliss said:
“Our digital infrastructure has been transformed through a combination of private and public investment to futureproof the Worcestershire network. This is particularly evident in rural areas like Charlton, bringing huge benefits to both residents and businesses.
I am proud to be able to share this occasion with the local MP, allowing him to see firsthand, the value the improvements are bringing to residents and businesses enabling them to embrace modern digital services and the opportunities that come with it.”
One small issue is that the official announcement refers to “speeds of up to 1GB“, when what they really mean is Gbps (Gigabits per second, not GigaBytes).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I’d love a 1GBps download lol.
Might have to wait 5 years but OR will eventually get there.
There’s no such thing. You can have 8Gbps but not 1GBps. That’s because in a data transmission network you cannot know that 8 sequential bits belong together to form a byte.
The proper terminology is important.
Imagine if every council did this, I’ve seen some councils spend similar on fancy street lights??
The council did LED street lights where we are. They are absolutely dreadful, one side of the street is now more or less in the dark.
Our council used to invest in new bus shelters every year when they realised that they hadn’t spent all of their budget.
If they didn’t use it then they’d lose some for the next year.
Every year our bus shelters would get swapped out yo a new design. Would be Feb-March without fail.
At least fancy lights actually have aesthetic benefits, meanwhile Oxford spent over 100k in installing traffic cameras to issue fines and blocking roads, actively going against their own people
Or 6 million so someone does not get offended when they look at a train station ffs.
Where I used to live they got so bothered about it they clubbed together and started their own ISP. Worked out good in the end for them.
In Wales they reduced speed limits in order to reduce wait times for ambulances outside hospitals.
They figured that they could cut wait times by ensuring that it took longer for the ambulances to arrive.
(loosely based on facts)
Yeah I remember Mark Drayford doing a lecture on how he was working hard to reduce s** related crime.
Nice from a guy who’s son is doing time as a R**ist