Cornwall now has fibre products available to a third of properties
Tuesday 17 April 2012 13:40:59 by Andrew Ferguson

Cornwall which announced its partnership with BT to bring superfast broadband to the area in September 2010 has hit a key milestone in the projects roll-out. The fibre products are now available to 95,000 Cornish homes and businesses, which is one third of all the premises in the county.

Take-up of the services sits at around the 6,000 mark, and orders are being received at a rate of 250 per week. If a similar pattern happens as did with the original ADSL roll-outs, this demand should increase significantly once coverage hits over half of the properties in the county.

"Superfast broadband is fantastic news for our business. It is saving the business time and money and changing the way we live and work. This is a fast growing and fast changing marketplace and now we have superfast broadband we can really take advantage of all the opportunities to grow the business.

Customers often send us videos they have taken using our cameras and we upload videos to YouTube and other social media. It used to take a couple of hours. Now we can upload and download videos in a fraction of the time.

We are also able to use cloud computing for applications, such as backing up our data on-line. Increasingly, we are exporting our products around the globe and superfast broadband means we can make more use of video conferencing and Skype to connect with our customers overseas and provide a more personal customer service."

Mark Nelson, owner of DogCam

The eventual target of the project is to offer fibre based services to 80% of properties, with wireless and satellite services covering the final 20%. Cornwall has been used as a testbed for 4G and white space wireless services so far, so even those areas that get a wireless service should receive a service in excess of the speeds that current generation ADSL can provide.