West Midlands communities set to benefit from £47m broadband boost

More than 159,000 homes and businesses across the region are getting improved services thanks to a £47 million investment by Openreach – the UK’s largest digital network provider.

When the work is finished, people living and working in more than a dozen communities across the West Midlands, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire will be able to contact their broadband provider and upgrade to full fibre broadband.

It follows several announcements last year outlining plans for more than 600,000 homes and businesses to get access to Openreach’s new network, including 300,000 in rural and harder to serve areas.

Kasam Hussain, Openreach’s regional director for the Midlands, 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 Europe.

“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 550,000 premises across the West Midlands, but we know there’s more to do and we’re committed to doing it.”

Full fibre broadband is up to 10 times faster than the average home broadband connection and around five times more reliable than the traditional copper-based network, providing more predictable, consistent speeds.

Across the West Midlands more than 130,000 homes and businesses have already ordered a full fibre service from a range of retail service providers using the Openreach network.

Openreach employs more than 2,700 people across the region.