Northumberland Front of Queue for Gigabit Broadband

On the back to today’s Government broadband announcement it’s been a wonderful week for Northumberland:-

1. The Government have announced the first stages of it’s plan to roll out full-fibre gigabit broadband across England and Northumberland are at the front of the queue. We have lobbied hard to make sure this happened – I have met 4 times with Digital Ministers Matt Warman and previously Margot James. More details here

2. The Borderlands Growth Deal was signed yesterday with £4m investment in a broadband voucher scheme which has been up and running since June in Northumberland and is already 80% committed. More details here.

3. City Fibre have announced their intention to invest in full fibre broadband in urban areas in Northumberland “We are delighted to confirm that CityFibre has announced the first widescale full fibre infrastructure investment in Northumberland. The initial investment will cover the conurbations of Ashington, Bedlington, Blyth and Morpeth connecting around 59,000 homes to CityFibre gigabit full fibre open access network. This is an important and significant first step in ensuring that Northumberland receives the digital infrastructure required to thrive in the modern age.”

In addition to that last year we secured up to £12m DCMS funding via North of Tyne for the Local Full Fibre Network project which takes full fibre into 270 public buildings, improves the infrastructure ‘backbone’ and allows connectivity to surrounding houses and businesses.

This latest Government announcement sets out the detail about how large areas in rural Northumberland are now at the front of the queue and will get gigabit broadband in the first phase of this £5bn project. This, together with the funding from the Borderland Growth Deal signed yesterday and City Fibre’s announcement that they will delivery to large parts of our county means that we are in now in a really great place. I have made the case to the Government with the support of our Conservative MPs and they have listened.

Gigabit Broadband

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