Fibre-optic broadband coming to Manchester

Residents of the Manchester Corridor – the Oxford Road area of the city – will soon get access to broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps when a next-generation fibre network is installed.

The fibre-optic cables are currently being deployed by communications company Geo and will create an open-access network.

This means that all internet, TV and telephone service providers will be able to lease the cables from Geo to run their services on.

Customers, as a result, will be able to buy different services from different service providers.

Once the first phase of the project is complete, expected to be at the end of the spring, further connections directly to homes and businesses will be introduced over the following 12 months.

Damien Bourke, policy and partnership manager for Northwest Regional Development Agency, said: "This is the first step on a journey to help make Manchester an increasingly competitive international city – a city in which businesses can find new and sustainable markets which, in turn, will help drive the regional economy.

"What better place to start this process than the Oxford Road area, where next-generation fibre broadband will only generate further wealth from the people, ideas and innovation that make the Corridor a unique place to do business," he continued.

The plans are separate to BT's roll-out of a next-generation broadband network that aims to reach 40 per cent of the UK population by the beginning of the 2012 Olympics.