Super-fast Broadband Goes Live In Hawarden

Super-fast broadband is now available to the first homes and businesses in Hawarden, BT announced today.

Around 7,500 local householders and firms in the area are poised to join people in Connahs Quay in the high-speed revolution as engineers complete the local upgrade in the coming weeks.

The latest development means that around 160,000 local premises in Wales are either already connected to the high-speed internet technology, or soon will be. BT has also announced plans to pass another 70,000 premises in the country with its fibre network either later this year or during 2012.

BT’s local access network business, Openreach, expects to make super-fast fibre broadband available to two-thirds of UK homes and businesses by the end of 2015*. It will use a mix of fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) and fibre to the premises (FTTP) technologies. Both are much faster than those speeds previously available to most UK homes and businesses.

FTTC, delivered to street cabinets, currently offers download speeds of up to 40Mbps and upload speeds up to 10Mbps. Openreach is planning to roughly double these speeds next year. FTTP, taking fibre all the way to homes and businesses, will offer speeds of up to 100Mbps.

Ann Beynon, BT director for Wales, said: “The arrival of super-fast broadband in Hawarden is a huge boost for local homes and businesses. It will transform their experience of the internet. They’re joining more than five million UK premises now passed by what we believe to be the world’s fastest growing fibre network.

“Fast and reliable internet connections are an essential part of our national infrastructure, whether we want them for entertainment at home, education online, boosting our businesses or delivering essential public services. BT’s investment in fibre broadband will benefit both Wales’s ability to compete and the wider local economy.”

Carl Sargeant, AM for Alyn and Deeside, said: "The arrival of super-fast broadband is a very important development for the town and it represents a significant investment in this area. I welcome the opportunity for local householders and businesses to be at the forefront of benefiting from this exciting technology.”

internet users with a super-fast connection can do much more online, all at the same time. For instance, a family could be downloading a movie, watching a TV replay service, surfing the internet and playing games online. A music track can be downloaded in about two seconds, a whole album in 30 seconds and a feature length HD movie in 10 minutes. Upload speeds are the fastest in the UK, allowing large videos and data files to be sent almost instantly and activities, such as uploading hi-resolution photos to Facebook, to be completed in seconds.