Salisbury has taken a step closer to becoming the UK’s first ‘fully digital’ city, according to BT’s offshoot Openreach.
Since March, more than 22,000 homes and businesses in the city could use Openreach’s broadband network after its multi-million-pound investment in the city.
From today, December 1, customers in the city cannot buy a traditional copper landline or broadband product. To upgrade, regrade or switch their broadband or telephone provider using the Openreach network, they can order only Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP or Full Fibre) broadband technology, giving download speeds of up to 1Gbps.
The company said Salisbury had been a pilot location for Openreach’s Full Fibre programme of investment in digital infrastructure with the company developing and testing ways to upgrade the UK’s landline network to Full Fibre – where voice calls are carried over the same fibre cables as broadband instead of over copper wires.
James Tappenden, Openreach’s Fibre First Director, said: “Salisbury is now one of the best-connected places in the UK and we want everyone in the city to benefit from our investment.
Full Fibre is more reliable and faster so can help us do much more online in a more efficient way. Our new network is future-proofed so will be ready for the next wave of bandwidth hungry applications which residents and businesses will demand so will serve Salisbury well for decades to come.”
Earlier this year, Salisbury became the first entire city in the UK to gain access to Openreach’s Full Fibre infrastructure. More than 2,500 homes and businesses in Salisbury have so far upgraded to the new Full Fibre network in the last nine months.
More information about Salisbury’s digital upgrade is available here: www.openreach.co.uk/salisbury.