New BT investment bringing fibre to more cities

Fibre optics
BT bringing broadband to businesses

BT plans to invest £50 million towards improving its commercial fibre broadband programme over the next three years.

The telecoms firm hopes that the money will benefit more than 30 cities across the country and make high speed broadband available to more than 400,000 additional customers.

The investment is to be focused on three areas: deploying fibre to cabinets serving multi-dwelling units (such as apartment blocks), laying further fibre technology to build sites in urban areas and providing fibre connections to areas of cities previously unable to receive it.

Mike Galvin, MD Network Investment at Openreach, said: "Our fibre programme is going extremely, connecting homes and businesses across the UK. Businesses in cities might already have access to ultra-fast speeds but fibre will give them greater choice."

UK ahead of Europe

According to the BT report, the rate of superfast broadband adoption is faster in the UK than France, Germany, Italy and Spain and is closing the gap on Japan and the U.S.

UK fibre-optic broadband availability stands at 73 per cent. The Broadband Delivery Programme plans to extend that number to 90 per cent by late 2015 or early 2016.

Fibre broadband in commercial zones allows businesses to speed up file and data transfers, connect to partners or colleagues across the world and enable greater interaction with the cloud, BT claims.