Working from home in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire could get easier after £5 bn better broadband promise

By Nicky Godding

29 October 2021

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More than 500,000 more rural homes and businesses will be given access to better broadband under government plans to level up the UK with improved internet connectivity.

More than half a million more rural homes and businesses will be given access to better broadband as part of plans to level up the country with improved internet connectivity, Digital Secretary Nadine Dorries has announced.

An estimated 567,000 hard-to-reach premises across Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Cheshire, Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Essex, Lincolnshire, East Riding and North Yorkshire are in line to benefit from the government’s £5 billion Project Gigabit, which is bringing next generation gigabit-capable broadband across the UK.

Most of the gigabit-capable connections will be delivered through full fibre broadband cables. This provides the speed and reliability needed for several people to work from home, stream ultra high definition video content and play next-generation online games all at the same time.

Digital Secretary Nadine Dorries said: "The latest stage of our £5 billion Project Gigabit plan will help hard-to-reach homes and businesses out of the broadband slow lane and plug them into the fastest and most reliable connections available.

"This investment is levelling up in action - building new internet connections in our rural communities so people > have the speed, reliability and freedom to live and work flexibly, and take advantage of new technologies. The hundreds of thousands of properties across ten English and six Scottish counties are not currently due for a gigabit upgrade from broadband companies or other public schemes. So the government is subsidising the roll out of new internet infrastructure capable of blistering download speeds of 1,000 megabits per second."

The specific locations to benefit in the areas announced today will be named when the contracts to deliver the connections are out to tender.

The projects will help the government deliver its target for at least 85 per cent of the UK to have access to a gigabit-capable connection by 2025. The UK has already hit 57 per cent gigabit coverage, up from less than six per cent in 2019.

By Nicky Godding

Nicky Godding is editor of The Business Magazine. Before her journalism career, she worked mainly in public relations moving into writing when she was invited to launch Retail Watch, a publication covering retail and real estate across Europe.

After some years of constant travelling, she tucked away her passport and concentrated on business writing, co-founding a successful regional business magazine. She has interviewed some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs who have built multi-million-pound businesses and reported on many science and technology firsts.

She reports on the region’s thriving business economy from start-ups, family businesses and multi-million-pound corporations, to the professionals that support their growth and the institutions that educate the next generation of business leaders.