Openreach has announced that it has discontinued copper-wire broadband products in Salisbury, with only fibre products now available to the town’s residents and businesses.
Since March this year, more than 22,000 homes and businesses in Salisbury have been able to take advantage of Openreach’s revolutionary futureproof Full Fibre broadband network following a multi-million-pound investment in the city by the UK’s biggest digital network builder.
Customers in the city will no longer be able to buy a traditional copper landline or broadband product.
Instead, if they want to upgrade, regrade or switch their broadband or telephone provider using the Openreach network, they’ll only be able to order ultra-reliable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP or Full Fibre) broadband technology, giving them ultrafast download speeds of up to 1Gbps through a great selection of retailers.
Salisbury has been a pilot location for Openreach’s Full Fibre programme of investment in digital infrastructure with the company developing and testing ways to upgrade the UK’s landline network to Full Fibre – where voice calls are carried over the same fibre cables as broadband instead of over copper wires.
James Tappenden, Openreach’s Fibre First Director, said: “Salisbury is now one of the best-connected places in the UK and we want everyone in the city to benefit from our investment.
“Full Fibre is more reliable and faster so can help us do much more online in a more efficient way.
“Our new network is future-proofed so will be ready for the next wave of bandwidth hungry applications which residents and businesses will demand so will serve Salisbury well for decades to come.
“We’re leading the way in the UK’s digital upgrade and this is just the beginning.”
“The traditional landline has served us well for generations, but it can’t go on indefinitely – and by December 2025 it will have reached the end of its life.
“By September 2023 Openreach will stop selling copper-based products nationally in preparation for withdrawal at the end of 2025.”
Earlier this year Salisbury celebrated becoming the first entire city in the UK to gain access to Openreach’s Full Fibre infrastructure.
Between March 2019 and March 2020, Openreach engineers completed the fastest city-wide network build in the UK – making the new technology available to thousands of homes and businesses.
More than 2,500 homes and businesses in Salisbury have so far upgraded to the new Full Fibre network in the last nine months.
The build in Salisbury forms part of a massive £12 billion investment which will see Openreach’s ambition to build Full Fibre infrastructure to 20 million premises throughout the UK by the mid-to-late 2020s – delivering significant economic, social and environmental benefits for rural and urban communities, assuming the right regulatory and political fibre enablers are in place.