New £10.73m broadband deal

Around 17,000 more households across Solihull and Warwickshire are now able to get high-speed fibre broadband following a new £10.73 million contract.

CSW Broadband partnership roll-out began connecting the first homes and businesses to faster fibre broadband last April.

The new deal spearheaded by Warwickshire County Council and Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council contributed an initial £3.68 million and £0.38 million. BT provided an additional £2.61m and a further £4.06m from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Superfast Extension Programme (SEP). It’s the first project in the West Midlands to be extended with SEP funding.

When complete, it will increase the percentage of homes and businesses able to access high-speed fibre broadband in Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire to nearly 94 per cent when combined with the first phase of the CSW Broadband roll-out already underway and the private sector investments of companies like BT.

Aston Cantlow, Berkswell, Eastcote, Over Whitacre, Sambourne, Tysoe and Willoughby are among the more rural communities to benefit from funding, making fibre broadband available to them for the first time.

Planning and surveying on the new phase will begin next year, and engineers from Openreach – BT’s local network business – will start connecting the first premises towards the end of 2016. The upgrade work will continue during 2017, 2018 and into 2019.

Residents and businesses choosing to upgrade will be able to get download speeds of up to 80 megabits per second (80Mbps) and upload speeds of up to 20Mbps*. Because the Openreach network is ‘open’, people will have a choice of who they take their service from, with more than 140 fibre broadband providers currently operating in the UK.