BUSINESSES and residents throughout Ludlow and south Shropshire will have access to high speed broadband within three years.
A multi-million pound investment led by Shropshire Council is promising that 90 per cent of the area will be covered by 2016.
The Connecting Shropshire project will build on BT’s commercial investment so that 130,000 premises should have access to broadband speeds of up to 80Mbps by the end of spring 2016.
It is claimed that this will cover 93 per cent of the buildings in the area.
During the course of the rollout BT may use Connecting Shropshire as a test bed for developing fibre innovations and other broadband technologies designed to boost speeds even further.
Shropshire is one of England’s most rural and sparsely populated counties and so the project will transform broadband speeds across the county.
According to the communications watchdog Ofcom, the county’s average downstream speed is cur rently 8.2Mbps, while 17.1 per cent of premises receive less than 2Mbps.
BT has been chosen following an extensive and thorough selection process. The company is contributing £8.6m towards the deployment in “non-commercial”
areas, while Shropshire Council is contributing £8.2m, with £7.84m coming from the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) funds.
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here