SUPERFAST broadband connections are coming to Oxford after rival firms announced plans to upgrade their networks.

BT says the city’s telephone exchanges will be fitted with its new Infinity system by March, replacing copper telephone wires with fibre optic glass cables which carry information at the speed of light.

Homes and businesses closest to the exchanges should get download speeds of up to 40 megabytes a second – equivalent to downloading an album of songs within 12 seconds.

BT has already installed superfast connections in Didcot and Bicester.

Exchanges in Botley and Wantage will be upgraded by the end of the year, followed by the rest of Oxford, including Summertown and Headington exchanges, Abingdon and Banbury three months later.

Witney and Thame will get the service by December 2011.

Meanwhile, rival provider Virgin Media, which already offers superfast broadband to hundreds of Oxford homes, has announced it will provide a 100Mb service across the county by 2012.

The dates for Virgin’s Oxford upgrade have not been announced, but the company said it would let people download a movie within 90 seconds.

Expert Grant Blank, of the Oxford Internet Institute, said: “Having broadband is now equivalent to the difference between a paved highway and a rutted track to your front door.

“A lot of the applications people are now using require extremely fast access.

“The obvious ones are in entertainment, but there are also increasing numbers of small applications written for phones.”

He added: “For the applications we know about right now, a range of 40Mb to 50Mb is certainly sufficient, but when we look at the history of the Internet, people have come up with all sorts of things that nobody anticipated two years earlier, and they have all needed more bandwidth.”

Computer tutor Ahmed Rahman, who shows pensioners and unemployed people how to go online at Northway Community Centre, welcomed news of the upgrades.

He added: “The Internet is no longer just for people to send and receive emails.

“More and more people are on the Internet now for all types of reasons and it gives them more freedom.

“People who I have introduced to the Internet here now use it to watch soap operas every week.”

He added: “I started on computers about 15 years ago, but the speeds we used then are nothing compared to what we have now.

“I cannot even imagine how fast connections are going to be within 10 or 15 years.”

Oxfordshire member of the European Parliament James Elles has been campaigning to improve broadband speeds around the county.

He said: “The lack of broadband and mobile coverage in Oxfordshire, especially in remote and rural areas, is having a serious impact on both the private and business environments.

“Unless action is taken this presents a severe risk for the future of competiveness of the county.”