Citizen News
Chorley villages get 20mb broadband service
4:38pm Wednesday 1st February 2012
More than 20,000 properties in Lancashire now have access to faster broadband.
Eccleston, Adlington, Coppull and Hoghton are among the villages earmarked for upgrades in coming months.
The communities are the latest in the county to benefit from the roll-out of BT’s next-generation broadband service – which more than doubles download speeds to 20 megabits per second.
Mike Blackburn, BT’s North West regional director, said: “This is an important step for Lancashire. In these challenging economic times, faster broadband can help businesses become more competitive, find new customers and work more flexibly as well as greatly improving the online services to families, homeworkers and other internet users.
“By the summer, around 90 per cent of the region’s homes and businesses will be served by an exchange that has been upgraded to deliver these higher speeds.”
The investment in the next-generation copper network is in addition to a £2.5billion roll-out of fibre-optic broadband, which will bring even faster speeds to around two-thirds of premises by the end of 2014.
Mr Blackburn added: “We are keen to work with the public sector to explore ways of bringing faster broadband to other areas which are geographically and commercially more challenging.”