The Council worked with partner organisations on the Superfast Worcestershire Programme prior to and post the launch of the first Local Broadband Plan in May 2012.

This plan set out the Council’s ambition to provide 90% of business and residential premises with Superfast (24Mbps+) broadband. Over the years (2012-2022) the project delivered on its ever-increasing coverage targets. However, the way in which consumers now use broadband has changed as people have become more dependent on high speed and increasingly reliable connections for work, business and for social or pleasure. This meant that we reinvested funding (gainshare) and secured further funding for the programme to transform the broadband network across Worcestershire, especially in hard-to-reach areas in line with the UK Government’s “Outside-in” approach (2019).

A Superfast Worcestershire website created for the duration of the programme to keep the communities of Worcestershire up to date with the ambitious deployment plan.

Nationally and locally the focus shifted during the project to deploying Gigabit capable (1000Mbps) infrastructure, which was identified in our Digitally Connected Worcestershire vision. However, we remain focused on ensuring nobody is left behind on less than 10Mbps download speeds and is working to support the last 1.25% premises that have less than 15Mbps to access superfast or greater speeds.

“The UK Gigabit Programme or ‘Project Gigabit’ is a £5 billion government infrastructure project that brings together everything the government is doing to enable and deliver fast and reliable digital connectivity for the entire country. Through one of the fastest rollouts in Europe, 60% of households will have access to gigabit speeds by the end of 2021 - a huge leap from 2019 when it was just one in ten.” – GOV.UK

As part of its ongoing programme, BDUK has started to launch phased contracts to those hard to reach parts of the UK that will need government support towards the cost of gigabit-capable broadband. Worcestershire is part of Lot24 in Phase 1b deployment, which aims to connect a total of 640,000 premises across the six Phase 1b locations.