On Friday 25th November, Suella joined Openreach engineers to witness first-hand the innovative engineering techniques used to upgrade and improve everyone’s internet coverage in Fareham to ultra-fast Full Fibre broadband.
Since June 2021, a significant number of homes and businesses across Fareham have benefited from Openreach’s full fibre build. Their plan seeks to build and connect customers to the company’s ultrafast, ultra-reliable Full Fibre broadband network - which is on track to reach 25 million homes and businesses by December 2026.
The Openreach team gave Suella a tour of their work, explained how the build in urban areas is happening alongside rural work and highlighted recent announcements that will bring Full Fibre broadband to hundreds of thousands of local premises.
Openreach is building Full Fibre faster, at lower costs and higher quality than anyone else in the UK. With download speeds of 1Gbps, it’s up to 10 times faster than the average home broadband connection. That means faster game downloads, better quality video calls and higher resolution movie streaming.
Suella was delighted to hear that Openreach are on track to complete their upgrades to most of the homes in Fareham within 18 months. Importantly, the Whiteley area is also included in this timeframe – an area that has concerned Suella due to its notably poor internet connections. As of today, there are 8,700 households which are ready for full fibre connections in Fareham.
To find out when your home will benefit from Openreach’s Full Fibre program, please visit the following link: www.openreach.com
Commenting, Suella said:
“I was delighted to be able to come and see the work Openreach is doing to improve and upgrade the provision of broadband in our area.
“I know from my inbox that this is a really important issue for many of my constituents and the progress, through technology, which is being made to deliver better and faster broadband is vital; vital not only to individuals and families within their homes, but also for the many small enterprises and businesses, who support our local economy, and for whom a good and reliable broadband connection is so important.
“Over recent years I’ve held a few public meetings to hear from people around Fareham about the poor internet service they’ve received. It’s clear to me that Openreach are solving this problem at an incredibly efficient rate. Within the next 18 months the majority of my constituents will have access to ultra-fast broadband, thanks to new fibre optic cables which are ten times faster and five times more reliable than the existing copper ones.
Great to meet the team of broadband engineers working intensively in Fareham and thanks for showing me around!”
Commenting, Tony Davies, Openreach’s Engagement Manager for Hampshire, said:
“We welcomed the opportunity to give Mrs Braverman a step-by-step demonstration of our technology. Our engineers work hard every day to keep communities across Hampshire and the wider region connected, and it was great to be able to share the challenges and realities of delivering this technology.”
