Posted: 31st Mar, 2010 By: MarkJ
Babcock International, an UK engineering support services organisation that is currently building a new wireless broadband network inside Norwich, has announced that it is planning to expand its broadband coverage into rural areas around the city.
Richard Lewis, Project Director for Babcock's Next Generation Networks arm, told EDP24 news:"We are already advancing phase two and building up cost cases to go out to rural towns and villages around Norwich. We are looking at bringing broadband to areas with low speeds or no broadband and unlikely to get any in the near term. We are in the process of building the network and we want people to come and talk to us and tell us if they need more digital services."
Norfolk councillors have in the recent past raised a storm due to the region frequently being missed out of BT's fibre optic based broadband services deployment. To be fair it's early days yet and the operator cannot be expected to reach everybody within a short period of time. The first generation of ADSL broadband took several years to rollout and FTTC will be no different.
Mr Lewis agreed that Norfolk suffered a "
serious lack" of broadband and it wants to help solve that, albeit by primarily targeting business customers. The network itself will be open access, allowing any ISP to also offer services to home users. Exact details on its extended rollout have yet to be revealed.