First Superfast – then Ultrafast!

It's only months ago that Superfast Broadband arrived in Audlem yet now there's talk of another leap forward – Ultrafast Broadband.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was talking about it over the weekend: "Wherever you live in Britain you should have Ultrafast Broadband" before going on to say it was going to happen.

BT says it has found a way to deliver Ultrafast – four times faster than Superfast – connections over its existing copper-based network. If it works, a national roll-out of so called G-Fast is expected to each most homes by the end of the decade.

Cheaper connections for most homes could allow the government to concentrate subsidies on harder to reach communities. We assume that would include those in the Audlem area and across the border in north Shropshire that were to receive Superfast later than the 95% of homes in the initial roll-out.

In the meantime, it is thought that there could be announcements in tomorrow's budget that a programme to connect remote homes via satellite and other technologies could be accelerated. Until now, about 1.5million homes nationally were due to miss out on a government pledge to give 95% of homes access to the fastest internet speeds by 2017.

Hopefully, the companies involved in Broadband will improve their service too. The consumer group Which have just reported that three of the largest providers – BT, Sky and TalkTalk – scored poorly on broadband speed, value for money and technical support. All three were below 50% for customers satisfaction.

BT seemed surprised and claimed that Ofcom data put it ahead on reliability and speed.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.