Wessex Internet has connected its first customer in South Wiltshire as part of an £18.8 million contract awarded by Project Gigabit, bringing faster broadband to around 14,500 residents across the region.
St Ives is the next town in Cambridgeshire set to benefit from Openreach’s full fibre rollout.
Having completed work in the Cambridgeshire towns of St Neots and Ramsey, Openreach is investing £3m to connect around 10,000 premises in St Ives.
More than 9,700 premises in Huntingdonshire and 42,000 across Cambridgeshire already have access to full fibre broadband with tens of thousands of homes and businesses already using the new network
Openreach is recruiting more than 400 engineers across the east of England this year, to support the build plans, including around 60 in Cambridgeshire.
Kasam Hussain, Openreach’s regional partnership director for the East, said: “Across the UK, our engineers make full fibre broadband available to a new home, on average, every 13 seconds.”