As part of its plan to make high-speed services available to 12 million premises in the UK by 2020, the infrastructure company has said it will provide the fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) and G.Fast connections to nine areas currently not serviced by fibre, providing access to one million businesses. Around 300,000 premises currently have access to FTTP.
Three zones of London – Westminster, Holborn and the City of London – and selected parts of Bath, Bradford, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and Salford, will be given access to one or both of the new services. A significant proportion of the roll-out is expected to take place over the next nine months with High Streets and business parks the main areas of focus.
DMSL is urging Openreach to move as quickly as possible to equip these areas and others with ultrafast services. “Any new commitment to invest and deliver super-fast broadband services to more SMBs has got to be positive for both businesses and resellers”, says John Carter, Managing Director of DMSL. “As well as giving businesses in those areas the prospect of ultrafast access, it will also encourage more competition and investment. The sooner Openreach and other providers can make ultrafast services available to all the UK’s businesses, the better.”
Carter pointed out that the recent announcements of planned further investment in fibre-based services by Virgin Media Business and BT, show that the market is accelerating rapidly. “Customers everywhere are demanding faster broadband. SMBs in particular need it – to take advantage of hosted voice, video, collaboration and cloud services. Ultrafast broadband gives smaller businesses almost as much capability as a leased line, but at a fraction of the cost. As soon as services are made available in these or any other areas, SMBs will subscribe to them.”
The faster pace of investment and development is good news for resellers, says Carter, because it paves the way for additional services business. “Fast broadband is the key. It opens the door to all the other managed and cloud-based services that resellers can and should now be offering to their customers. That is the future and connectivity is the entry point for everything.”