Hard to reach premises in Norfolk are to receive between £115m and £195m of funding as part of the Government’s Project Gigabit to provide 1GB per second broadband to up to 119,000 premises. Contracts will be awarded from February 2022.
Rural homes and businesses across Norfolk and Suffolk will get next-generation gigabit broadband brought to them under a £5 billion plan to level up internet access across the UK.
Cllr Tom FitzPatrick, Norfolk Cabinet Member for Innovation, Transformations & Performance said:
“Norfolk County Council is committed to making Norfolk the best-connected rural county in the country and we are striving for 100% availability of fast broadband to all Norfolk properties. We welcome this latest announcement from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport about further significant investment in Norfolk’s digital infrastructure, and the huge benefits that this will bring. We are delighted with the high priority that Norfolk has been given. Project Gigabit will help our residents to fully benefit from digital opportunities, help our businesses grow and improve their profitability, and so significantly benefit our rural economy.”
New details published today from Project Gigabit reveal that up to 210,000 rural homes and businesses in the region and surrounding areas are in line to be connected with lightning-fast speeds.
This is in addition to the roll-out of broadband by commercial providers, which is seeing gigabit broadband being deployed rapidly across the country – from one in ten households in the UK in 2019 to more than two in five today. The country is also on track for one of the fastest roll-outs in Europe and for 60 per cent of all households to have access to gigabit speeds by the end of this year.
The Project Gigabit programme targets properties that would otherwise have been left behind in broadband companies’ roll-out plans, prioritising those that currently have the slowest connections.
Their available speeds will rocket to more than 1,000 megabits or one gigabit per second – enough to download a High Definition movie in less than 30 seconds and to lay the foundations for tomorrow’s tech, such as 8K-quality video streaming.
It means families no longer having to battle over bandwidth and will give people in rural areas the freedom to live and work more flexibly, with the speed and reliability needed to start and run businesses.
Project Gigabit has announced that more investment is planned for the East of England, and more details to be shared in due course.
