The fibre to the premises (FTTP) solution is part of stage 4 of Herefordshire Council’s Fastershire project.
Under the Fastershire contract, part funded by the by the Rural Broadband Infrastructure Scheme and managed by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs using the Rural Development Programme for England (RDPE), Airband are providing access to 10 dispersed clusters of premises spread across the county.
Airband is an independent internet service provider which specialises in bringing high speed broadband to homes, business and industry across rural and hard-to-reach areas.
Airband’s Marches project manager, Martin Cumming, said he was very pleased with the project’s progress:
“It has been a pleasure engaging with the people in this area – they have been very helpful and supportive and are keen to enjoy faster broadband both for themselves and the rest of their community.
“We are going to be working in and around Leintwardine from July and Brimfield in August and then we will be heading towards Hereford, down as far as Much Marcle – so you can expect to see Airband vans, and lots of friendly Airband engineers out and about in these areas!”
Andy Jones is a commercial pilot living on a smallholding with his wife and children in Collington. His wife is an HR consultant for the NHS and often works remotely.
“We were scraping by with incredibly low broadband speeds which made life very challenging. “I lobbied BT for 10 years, I was so relieved when I found out we were able to get fibre to the premises with Airband as part of the Fastershire project.
“We now have 80 Mbps upload and download – which is great! My wife is able to work remotely and we can run all kinds of snazzy gadgets,” he said.
Councillor Shaw, ward member Bromyard Bringsty said, “Faster broadband is so vital in rural areas and this is a wonderful boost for the communities in and around Tedstone Wafre.
“Fastershire’s investment in faster broadband means that more of the harder to reach parts of Herefordshire can benefit from faster broadband and the ability to work from home, run multiple devices will ultimately make the county a better place to live and work.”
Currently over 88% of Herefordshire properties can access a 30mbps or greater service, increasing to 97% under phase 2,
To find out if your property can already access faster broadband or where your property sits in Fastershire’s plans, visit www.fastershire.com
