Catching Up With Online Business

According to a recent announcement by the Manchester City Council, the Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) broadband network proposed last year is now ready to be installed from the end of this month. The installation process will begin from the Oxford Road area in Manchester.

The city council has said that the new network may offer residents and businesses speeds up to 1000 times faster than their current service. However, taking cue from other FTTP networks around the world, a more realistic estimate of the end user speed will be closer to ‘up to’ 100 Mbps levels.

The executive member for environment, Councillor Neil Swannick sounded confident that this new project would have great benefits for everybody. He added that the growth of Manchester’s economy too is dependent on having a competitive broadband infrastructure, and thus, it is extremely important to provide high-speed internet services to people at affordable prices. The initiative is part of the larger Next Generation Digital City Project, which aims at providing easy access to better digital services.

Though this project will put Manchester in a much better position in terms of being an attractive business location, Mr. Swannick also agreed on the fact that Manchester, and United Kingdom as a whole are facing serious competitive threats from the rest of the Europe. This is because other cities such as Amsterdam and Paris have been providing better broadband services to homes and businesses, and that too at a much lower cost than anywhere in the UK.

Once the first stage of establishing the network is completed, the next aim will be to spread these installations in the surrounding areas. The next area to benefit would be East Manchester, after which a new Internet Hub in the Central Park area would be installed.