Openreach is upgrading the Internet in around 185,000 locations in the West Midlands as part of a £ 25 billion investment.
The telecommunications specialist is converting three million households and businesses – in some of the UK’s hardest-to-serve communities – to full fiber.
And thousands of homes and businesses in Hereford, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, West Midlands and Worcestershire are expected to benefit from a five-year national civil engineering achievement.
Openreach, which has pledged to create an additional 1,000 new jobs this year, says its plans are fundamental to the UK government achieving its goal of serving 85 percent of the UK with gigabit broadband by 2025.
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Kasam Hussain, Openreach Regional Director for the West Midlands, said: “Building a new ultra-fast broadband network in the West Midlands is a major challenge and some parts of the region will inevitably require public funding.
“Our expanded blueprint, however, means that taxpayer subsidies can be limited to the most difficult-to-connect households and businesses. With other networkers’ investments, we would hope that these will continue to shrink.”
“This is an extremely complex nationwide engineering project. It will help improve the UK as the effects of full fiber broadband range from increased economic prosperity and international competitiveness to greater employment and environmental benefits.
“We are also excited to continue to defy the national trend by creating more jobs in the region and apprentices joining in droves to begin their careers as engineers.”
Once the upgrades are complete, the premises can access download speeds ten times faster than the average home broadband connection. That means faster game downloads, better video calls, and high definition movie streaming.