Connectivity has often been a struggle for rural parts of the UK, but it seems that many towns, villages and other more remote regions of the country will soon benefit from ultrafast, ultra reliable and futureproof broadband.
Openreach has just outlined plans to accelerate its full fibre build plan, which will see 250,000 homes and businesses across more than 200 market towns and villages benefit.
This portion of the plan is expected to be completed by March 2021 – and building is expected to start within the next 14 months.
This follows village trials that were carried out towards the end of last year, with engineers coming up with a range of skills, techniques and tools to help Openreach access areas that were previously viewed as either too complex or too expensive to upgrade.
It’s thought that enhanced connectivity could help bring half a million people back into the workforce, while giving at least 400,000 more the freedom to work from home – and the freedom to choose where they live and work.
It could also help to stimulate regional and rural economic growth, with 270,000 people potentially freed to relocate from cities to more rural areas.
Clive Selley, CEO, said: “Our full fibre build programme is going great guns – having passed over 2 million premises already on the way to our 4m target by March 2021. We’re now building at around 26,000 premises a week in over 100 locations – reaching a new home or business every 23 seconds. That’s up from 13,000 premises a week this time last year.”
He went on to add that Openreach is now aiming to reach 15 million premises by the middle of this decade – but the investment conditions need to be in place in order to achieve this.
Another exciting development for businesses is the continuing rollout of 5G, with all the major networks in the UK – EE, O2, Three and Vodafone – getting in on the act. 5G is faster and more reliable than other technologies, boasting greater capacity and lower response times as well.
Businesses can benefit from 5G in all sorts of ways. It will make it easier to work remotely, operate machinery from different locations, use tech capabilities like 4K, virtual reality, augmented reality, holographic calls… the list goes on.
If you’d like to find out more about superfast broadband and get help or advice relating to IT services in Doncaster, give us a call here at Holistic IT. We can advise you on all aspects of design, planning and implementation of IT projects, cybersecurity, cloud migration, virtual systems and more.
We have thousands of products at our disposal and enjoy strong relationships with all the leading vendors – all of which you can take full advantage of!
ADDRESS
