Gloucestershire UK Celebrate Over 98 Percent Superfast Broadband Cover
The Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) in England has today celebrated how their Fastershire programme, which was jointly conducted alongside Herefordshire Council, has now helped to enable 98.5% of properties in the county to access a “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) connection, up from only 39% in 2012 and 36% in 2011.
The Fastershire project, which was backed by millions in state aid and delivered various different deployment contracts with Openreach (BT), Gigaclear, Airband, FullFibre Ltd and others (initially using FTTC technology, before switching to FTTP in later phases), was broadly focused on helping to upgrade premises in areas that commercial operators had deemed unviable to serve with private investment alone (usually rural communities).
The main focus of this effort was on expanding the availability of “superfast” (30Mbps+) capable broadband networks and ISPs. In addition, Fastershire has also helped increase gigabit-capable broadband (1000Mbps+) coverage across Gloucestershire, and the county now boasts over 80% gigabit coverage and 60% full fibre (FTTP) access, compared to only 1% in 2012.
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Cllr David Gray said:
“Access to fast and reliable broadband is essential for our communities, businesses and overall economic growth and we’re proud of the progress made through the Fastershire Broadband Project.
Building broadband infrastructure across the county has been challenging, but with the support of our partners and communities, this cross-county collaboration has benefited properties in every district in the county. As the Fastershire Broadband Project draws to a close, we are committed to extending improved broadband access even further.”
The Government’s £5bn Project Gigabit programme is currently still working to extend 1Gbps download speeds (200Mbps+ uploads) to reach “nationwide” coverage (c. 99%) by around 2030 (currently running at over 86%), although that target is a national average and the specific expectation for Gloucestershire may be lower.
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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Yet still my only option from Openreach is ADSL. How does that make sense in the administrative town? (thank god we’ve had Virgin Media HFC for 7 years because the only other viable option is Vodafone 5G.)
Despite my negative criticisms though, this is good news!
At least we can get VDSL here (70/20Mbps), a whole 1.5 miles from the city centre. But fibre remains a dream, and the whole of north/east Gloucester still lacks it, after all these years. Looks like we might finally join the future by the end of 2026…
We’ll have to hope, I haven’t seen any updates yet though.
Openreach ADSL was an unreliable and sluggish experience when we were on it before Virgin came, I hope FTTP should eventually transport it into the 21st century. We have partial FTTC coverage on our street, but it’s very limited.
This is news to me, I live 2 miles from Gloucester city centre and the best speed I have ever attained is 6Mb/s !!!