February 6, 2014 2.17 pm This story is over 121 months old

Extra £2.8m to improve Lincolnshire broadband

More funds, better speeds: An additional £2.8 million has been allocated to bring superfast broadband to thousands more homes and businesses in Lincolnshire.
Bill Murphy, Managing Director of Next Generation Access at BT, speaking at the Onlincolnshire Digital conference in Lincoln. Photo: Steve Smailes for The Lincolnite

An additional £2.8 million has been allocated to bring superfast broadband to thousands more homes and businesses in Lincolnshire.

Over 5,000 properties will benefit from fibre broadband, of which around 4,000 will get ‘superfast’ speeds of 24 Mbps and above.

Some £1.6 million of the money has been provided by the European Regional Development Fund, with £510,000 from Lincolnshire County Council and £680,000 from BT.

In March last year, Lincolnshire County Council signed a £48 million contract with BT to deliver the Onlincolnshire programme, which originally pledged to bring fibre broadband to at least 88% of all premises.

The project is building on BT’s own commercial deployment which has made the technology available to around 167,000 Lincolnshire homes and businesses so far.

The additional improvements will be finished within the original timescale of the project, with work on track to be completed by the end of April 2016.

Councillor Colin Davie, Executive Member for Economic Development, said: “Thanks to this new investment, more than 5,000 properties will be able to benefit from fibre broadband, with around 4,000 getting superfast speeds.

“That means, at the end of project, over 89% of the county will be able to take advantage of all the benefits that superfast broadband connections have to offer.”

Bill Murphy, BT’s Managing Director for next generation access, said: “Hard work and commitment to this project has secured further investment which will bring fibre broadband to thousands more homes and businesses in Lincolnshire.

“The most important aim is to ensure as many people as possible can benefit from fibre broadband, so this is great news for both businesses and consumers in the county.”

As previously reported, the Onlincolnshire programme also secured almost half a million pounds of funding from the EU to support local businesses through events and technology hubs.