East Ren’s new, digital revolution marches on

More than 1,000 homes and businesses are due to benefit from the delivery of fibre broadband as East Ren’s digital revolution continues.

As well as Glasgow areas including Langside, East Renfrewshire’s Giffnock, Merrylee and Newton Mearns have just been announced as the next areas to benefit from the £410 million Digital Scotland’s high-speed delivery with the first recipients expected by next spring.

East Renfrewshire Council claims that people benefitting from the service can expect speeds of up to 80Mbps, due to the engineering rollout being delivered on the ground by BT’s local network business, Openreach.

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Provided they opt to sign up to the service, users will be able to quickly access the internet and download and share large files at the same time, and more quickly.

The Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband programme is looking to provide a fibre optic broadband infrastructure to areas not covered by commercial deployment.

Combined with commercial roll-out plans by the private sector, around 85% of premises in Scotland will have access to fibre broadband by the end of 2015/16 and 95% by the end of 2017/18.

Nicola Sturgeon, the next first minister, said: “The scale of the challenge of delivering fibre broadband across our communities in Scotland shouldn’t be underestimated, but engineersare working hard and making good progress.

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“It’s fantastic to see the project extending into places like Giffnock, which will benefit greatly from the advantages fibre broadband brings.”

Councillor Tony Buchanan, convener for infrastructure and sustainability at East Renfrewshire council, said: “We have been fully supportive of the broadband roll-out programme and have worked closely with our colleagues in BT to achieve this excellent result for the residents of East Renfrewshire.

“We have so many highly-educated residents and a lot of small micro-enterprises and home-based consultants who will all welcome access to these superfast services.

“This will be a major boost to the education, economic and social outcomes in our authority.”

BT is investing £126 million in the programme.

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