Thousands of homes in East Lancashire are set to benefit from a major broadband boost.
Work is being carried out to upgrade communities in Burnley, Padiham and Great Harwood as part of a £58 million investment by Openreach.
The investment will allow people living and working in the area to upgrade to full fibre broadband after contacting their broadband provider.
Nearly 200,000 properties across the North West are set to benefit, including other communities in Greater Manchester, Cheshire and Merseyside.
It is a further boost for the region as it follows several key announcements last year outlining plans that more than one million homes and businesses would be getting access to Openreach’s new network, including tens of thousands in rural and harder to serve areas.
Openreach is the UK’s largest digital network provider, used by the likes of BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and Zen.
Robert Thorburn, Openreach’s regional director for the North, said: “Nobody in the UK is building full fibre faster, further or at a higher quality than Openreach.
“We’re reaching more communities than ever and our team of highly-skilled engineers, alongside our build partners, are working hard to deliver some of the fastest and most reliable broadband available anywhere in the world.
“In 2021 our engineers built around 770 metres of new broadband cables every minute – making Ultrafast broadband available to another home every 13 seconds.
“We’ve already reached six million homes and businesses across the UK with ultrafast full fibre technology including more than 815,000 in the North West but we know there’s more to do and we’re committed to doing it.”
Full fibre broadband is up to ten times faster than the average home broadband connection.
It is also five times more reliable than the traditional copper-based network, providing more predictable, consistent speeds.
Over 163,000 homes and business across the North West have already ordered a full fibre service from a range of providers in the Openreach network.
Another 652,000 are yet to upgrade and could be benefiting some of the fastest broadband connections in Europe.
Recent research by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) has highlighted the economic benefits of connecting everyone in the North West to full fibre – it is estimated it would create a £5.5 billion boost for the local economy.