Major milestone in Superfast Staffordshire fibre broadband project

Superfast Staffordshire – the multi-million pound high-speed fibre broadband programme – is celebrating a major milestone after bringing the technology to two more villages.

Marchington and Draycott-in-the-Clay are the latest communities to benefit; taking the number of county premises now within reach of the new fibre network to more than 20,000. Nearly 700 homes and businesses in the villages are now able to connect to the new network, partners Staffordshire County Council and BT have announced.

Additional engineering work will take place in the coming months to connect even more Marchington premises to faster fibre broadband next year.

Steve Henderson, BT’s regional director for broadband partnerships, said: “The high number of single track roads in this part of the county posed new challenges for engineers. However, by working closely with the County Council we were able to ensure engineers got to the more remote areas they needed to work in, whilst keeping disruption to local residents and motorists to an absolute minimum.”

People wanting to find out if their area has been enabled should use the new online map and easy-to-use line checker on the Superfast Staffordshire website. These allow people to get up-to-date information about the status of an exchange area and to get specific information about premises by entering a postcode or telephone number. It can be accessed by logging onto: www.superfaststaffordshire.co.uk

Once an area has ‘gone live’, people are able to get download speeds of up to 80 megabits per second (Mbps) and uploads of up to 20Mbps*. It’s an ‘opt in’ service, but because the Openreach network is ‘open’, residents and businesses wanting to upgrade have a choice of fibre broadband providers, with more than 140 companies now operating in the UK.

During the Superfast Staffordshire roll-out, more than one million metres of fibre optic cable and around 500 new street-side cabinets will be installed to connect people to the new network across the county. This partnership roll-out is in addition to BT’s commercial rollout which has already made fibre broadband available to more than 290,000 premises across the county.