Devizes and Westbury to get super-fast broadband

BT has announced the 41 market towns that will benefit from the next phase of BT’s super-fast fibre broadband deployment, serving around 300,000 businesses and consumers across these areas – and two Wiltshire towns have made the cut.

Customers in Devizes and Westbury will be able to access super-fast broadband speeds of up to 40Mb/s from Spring 2012.

This follows last month’s news that, for the first time, BT would include a number of market towns in the next phase of its £2.5 billion fibre broadband roll-out.

This is in response to customer demand for super-fast speeds in these areas and as part of BT’s commitment to deliver faster broadband speeds to more rural parts of the country.

By adapting its deployment model for fibre, says the company, BT has been able to create a commercial case for rolling out fibre to selected market towns in rural areas where the premises and cabinets are suitably clustered.

The list of market towns join the 785 exchange locations across the country that BT has already revealed under its fibre roll-out plan to date. These locations serve around eight million premises in total, around half of BT’s total fibre roll-out plan.

BT is investing up to £2.5 billion to deliver fibre broadband to up to two thirds of UK homes and businesses, subject to an acceptable environment for investment. It’s the largest single commercial investment in fibre-based broadband ever undertaken in the UK, and is currently one of the biggest civil engineering projects running in Europe.

Super-fast broadband, using fibre to street cabinets (FTTC), offers much faster download speeds of up to 40Mb/s, potentially rising to 60Mb/s, and upstream speeds of 10Mb/s, which could rise to 15Mb/s in the future. BT is also trialling fibre to the premises (FTTP) broadband services, at download speeds of up to 100Mb/s.