BT hooks up Cornish broadband

UK TELCO British Telecom (BT) has hooked up Cornish customers to broadband and is on track to deliver it to other rural punters on time.

BT has delivered on the promise it made to connect Cornish customers to what it calls "superfast" broadband back in November last year.

The scheme is part of a £132 million pilot project to get rural areas up and running on high speed broadband connections.

BT has installed the service in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly and 50 of its customers are already connected. The company plans to offer the same service in St Agnes, St Day, Portreath, Devoran, Leedstown, Stenalees and Par by 31 March, adding another 14,000 customers. So there is still room for it to miss the deadline if they aren't all connected within the next three days.

BT is using South East Cornwall as a testing ground in the hope it can roll out the same system over other rural UK areas. It can't hang about because BT's "superfast" broadband deadline has been given a boost by the European Regional Development Fund Convergence, which wants to see 80 per cent of households and businesses in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly hooked up.

BT also can't afford to dither about because it has Virgin, Talktalk and other competing ISP operators snapping at its heels offering their own broadband services. That development was hastened by Ofcom forcing BT to unbundled its monopolistic infrastructure for the competition. µ