Thousands of homes in Aberdeenshire to get access to faster broadband

Openreach says it plans to make full fibre broadband available to tens of thousands of homes and businesses in Aberdeenshire communities.

Ellon, Inverurie, Stonehaven, Cowie, Banff, Fraserburgh and Peterhead, are among 60 small and rural towns and villages across Scotland to be upgraded by Openreach, without taxpayer subsidy.

The firm hopes making faster broadband speeds available to them will help boost their Covid-19 economic recovery.

Work is expected to get under way in many of the locations within the next 12-18 months although, due to the size of the build, some places will see work continue into 2024.

Robert Thorburn, Openreach’s Partnership Director for Scotland, said: "We've already upgraded hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses across Scotland to full fibre.

"As well as keeping the existing network running throughout the Covid-19 crisis, our engineers have, safely and with social distancing in place, continued building the new infrastructure to make sure that as lockdown restrictions ease, our network is there to support families, businesses and the economic recovery.

"Many Scottish households and businesses can already switch to the new technology – which we’ve already started to build in Aberdeen – and hundreds of thousands more will follow in the months and years ahead, including in these harder-to-reach communities in Aberdeenshire.

"People can check online and ask their broadband providers to find out more about the many benefits. Full fibre is more reliable and more resilient – meaning fewer faults and more predictable, consistent speeds. It’s also ‘future-proof’ to easily meet the growing data demands of future technologies."