Graham Stuart, MP for Beverley and Holderness, has welcomed the news that Hornsea, Withernsea and Atwick are to benefit from moves to better support rural areas across the UK with faster and more reliable internet access.
BT Openreach has announced that it will be laying down the infrastructure for new full-fibre broadband in 227 market towns and villages across the UK; commencing the work within the next 14 months.
250,000 homes are set to benefit from the accelerated plans, which are part of Openreach’s target to reach an extra 4 million homes and businesses by March 2021. The expansion is possible due to investment into new technology and techniques that has allowed full-fibre to be brought into areas previously considered either too complex or costly to upgrade.
Commenting on the news, Graham said: “This is great news for locals in Hornsea, Withernsea and Atwick, who have had to put up with endless buffering and surfing the web at a snail’s pace for far too long.
“This new full-fibre broadband is more reliable and much faster, so people can work from wherever they want instead of being forced to commute to cities like Hull or Leeds. Around half a million people could be brought back into the workforce with better broadband, and it has the potential to cut up to 300 million commutes.
“Better broadband can also open up new avenues for family businesses, potentially growing new customer bases across the world.”
The Government has committed to bringing full fibre and gigabit-capable broadband to every home and business in the UK by 2025, supported by £5 billion investment to roll out gigabit-capable broadband in the hardest to reach areas of the country.
Legislation will also be introduced to require all new houses to be built with the infrastructure required to support state-of-the-art broadband connections.
Graham added, “We’ve covered over 96% of the country with superfast broadband, and our ‘Universal Service Obligation’ will give everyone the right to demand speeds of at least 10Mbps from their provider.
“But these facts and figures are worthless when people in rural areas of my constituency are still struggling with shocking speeds, so I’m delighted that tangible improvements will be arriving in the coming year or so.”
