A FURTHER 119,000 homes and businesses in Yorkshire are to benefit from BT’s £1.5 billion plans for super-fast broadband, including 46,000 in York and Harrogate.
The BT announcement signals the biggest phase of the UK-wide project to date, with a further eight exchanges to be upgraded in Yorkshire between autumn of this year and summer 2011.
It has been hailed as “fantastic news” by Susie Cawood, head of York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce.
She said: “This will allow our region to continue to compete on the world stage.”
This latest phase builds on the 159,000 lines due to be upgraded in Yorkshire by this summer, which have already been announced – and will take the total number of super-fast fibre-based lines in the region to about 278,000.
Super-fast broadband offers much faster download speeds of up to 40Mb/s, potentially rising to 60Mb/s, and upstream speeds of 10Mb/s, with the chance of rising to 15Mb/s giving customers greater flexibility in how they use the internet including much easier uploads of photos and videos.
These speeds also offer businesses major advantages, including new services and more sophisticated communications, such as high-quality video conferencing.
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