£28m Leicestershire Boost for Ultrafast Full Fibre Broadband
More locations to get Full Fibre, on top of rural places announced last month
Around 70,000 more Leicestershire homes and businesses are set to benefit from a broadband boost in the region of £28m[1] thanks to Openreach – the UK’s largest broadband network provider.
People living and working a number of Leicestershire locations – including Goscote, Hinckley, Melton Mowbray and Thurnby – are all set to benefit from the company’s national upgrade plan, with the majority of premises in each area gaining access to the latest Ultrafast, ultra-reliable Full Fibre broadband.
Work will take place between now and 2026, with the full list of locations and timescales published on Openreach’s website.
The news comes hot on the heels of a similar announcement last month, when 275,000 premises – in 105 mainly rural and harder to serve areas across the East Midlands – were also included in Openreach’s build plan.
Both announcements build on Openreach’s existing work in the region, where nearly 250,000 homes and businesses can already order ultrafast, ultra-reliable full fibre broadband.
Following a competitive tender process, a number of partners – including Telent – were chosen by Openreach to support the upgrades and will play a crucial role in building the new network to thousands of premises in these locations
Kasam Hussain, Openreach’s regional director for the East Midlands, said: “Nobody in the UK is building full fibre faster, further or at a higher quality than Openreach. We’re reaching more communities than ever before and our team of highly-skilled engineers, alongside our build partners, are working hard to deliver some of the fastest and most reliable broadband available anywhere in the world.
“Just last month we announced 105 rural and hard to reach locations across the East Midlands were to benefit, so it’s great that we’re able to reveal another huge broadband boost for the region with these additional locations.
“The latest details and timescales are available on our website as the build planning progresses.”
Ric Welsby, Managing Director of Telent Infrastructure Services, said; “We are very pleased to be supporting Openreach in the build of this ultrafast and ultra-reliable full fibre broadband network. The long-term contracts we have been awarded allow us to recruit the people we need to provide an excellent service to Openreach. We have many exciting roles to fill, I would encourage anyone who is interested in working on this important national infrastructure project to visit our website.”
The company’s updated build plan will be fundamental to the UK Government achieving its target of delivering ‘gigabit capable’ broadband to 85 per cent of UK by 2025 and it follows an extended investment commitment by its parent, BT Group – which means Openreach will now build Full Fibre technology to a total of 25 million premises, including more than six million in the hardest-to-serve parts of the country by the end of 2026.
Openreach is already building Full Fibre faster, at lower cost and higher quality than anyone else in the UK, having made the technology available to more than 5 million homes and business so far.
Openreach plays an important role across the East Midlands region. More than 1,600 of our people live and work here. Recent research by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) highlighted the clear economic benefits of connecting everyone in the East Midlands to full fibre. It estimated this would create a £3.5 billion boost to the local economy.
This short video explains what Full Fibre technology is and you can find out more about our Fibre First programme, latest availability and local plans here.
For further information
For more information please contact Chris Jones in the Openreach PR team on: 07423 470496 or email chris.jones@openreach.co.uk.
All news releases can be accessed on our web site. Or you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn for the latest Openreach news and opinion.
Notes to Editors
With download speeds of 1 Gbps, it’s up to 10 times faster than the average home broadband connection. That means faster game downloads, better quality video calls and higher resolution movie streaming.
You can also use multiple devices at once without experiencing slowdown – so more people in your household can get online at once. Even if the rest of your family are making video calls, streaming box sets or gaming online, all at the same time – you won’t experience stuttering, buffering or dropouts.
Full fibre is also less affected by peak time congestion – so you can enjoy your Saturday night blockbuster in 4K without the dreaded buffering screen.
Surf, shop, game, play, click, teach, talk, work, create, learn, buy, sell, watch and do business without skipping a beat or slowing down.
About Openreach
Openreach Limited is the UK’s digital network business.
We’re more than 35,000 people, working in every community to connect homes, schools, shops, banks, hospitals, libraries, mobile phone masts, broadcasters, governments and businesses – large and small – to the world.
Our mission is to build the best possible network, with the highest quality service, making sure that everyone in the UK can be connected.
We work on behalf of more than 665 communications providers like BT, SKY, TalkTalk, Vodafone, and Zen, and our broadband network is the biggest in the UK, passing more than 31.8m premises.
Over the last decade we’ve invested more than £15 billion into our network and, at more than 190 million kilometres – it’s now long enough to wrap around the world 4,798 times.
Today we’re building an even faster, more reliable and future-proof broadband network which will be the UK’s digital platform for decades to come. We’re making progress towards our full fibre optic network target to reach 25 million premises by December 2026. Research shows a nationwide Full Fibre network could potentially provide a £59bn boost to UK productivity.1
To help build the new fibre network and deliver better service across the country – we’ve created and filled more than 9,000 apprenticeship roles in the last two years and we’re recruiting another 1,000 trainee roles in Openreach in 2021.
We’re also building greener – we operate the UK’s second largest commercial fleet and want to help lead the transition to electric vehicles, with a target to transition our fleet to being electric in 2030.
Openreach is a highly regulated, wholly owned, and independently governed unit of the BT Group. More than 90 per cent of our revenues come from services that are regulated by Ofcom and any company can access our products under equivalent prices, terms and conditions.
For the year ended 31 March 2021, we reported revenue of £5,244m
For more information, visit www.openreach.co.uk
[1] Investment figure based on an average build cost of £400 per premises