Jo O’Reilly

SMALL businesses in Essex, including Harlow and the surrounding villages, are set to receive a faster broadband service following a £24.6 million deal to deliver high-speed fibre broadband to thousands more properties. The project by Essex County Council and BT builds on BT’s commercial plans, which have already made fibre broadband available to more than 500,000 Essex premises.

Communications Minister Ed Vaizey said, “This project will see thousands of homes and businesses across Essex gain access to superfast broadband speeds and will be instrumental in driving growth, boosting the local economy, and achieving the Government’s objective of reaching 95% of UK premises by 2017.”

The technology behind the project was first discovered in Harlow by Nobel Prize winner Charles Kao, the’Godfather of broadband’and his co-workers whilst working at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories (STL).