5,000 Jersey Customers Now Connected to Fiber Broadband

ST HELIER, JERSEY - JT has now connected more than 5,000 premises to Jersey’s new fiber broadband network. The project started last year, and is on track for completion before the end of 2016, when around 35,000 broadband customers will be able to access some of the quickest broadband services in the world.

Having a fiber connection in 14 percent of customer premises, which is double the proportion that Jersey had in 2012, already puts Jersey in twelfth place in the world in terms of the scale of its fiber-to-the-home network, enabling broadband speeds of more than 1 Gbps. That figure puts Jersey’s superfast fiber connection rate ahead of both the UK and Guernsey.

Jersey's fiber broadband project, which is the island's biggest civil engineering project in about 70 years, has been split into three phases: building the core network infrastructure, running fiber cables past all island premises and then actually connecting all broadband customers to the new network. The first two phases are nearly complete. The core network has now been built, and JT has laid 490 miles of cable out of a project total of 615 miles.

"We are really pleased with progress this year, and I would like to take this opportunity to commend my team for their hard work," Dave Newbold, gigabit program director for JT said. "We are well on track to complete the project on time by the end of 2016. However, we hope to do better than that, and the teams are working hard, and efficiently, to deliver this world-leading project as swiftly as possible. We know that progress is not as fast as some would like, but we are looking at ways to get through this quicker so that more Islanders can get the benefits of fiber sooner.

"Once completed Jersey will be one of very few places in the world with fiber broadband connected all the way to the homes of every customer; that network is being put in place so that the island is ready for the projected escalation in the services and entertainment which islanders will access over the Internet. Currently, we are simply switching all customers from broadband delivered over the previous copper cabling, to the new fiber-optic network; a vast majority will be done free of charge, and this is about building a new infrastructure for the future. Once we are ready to switch a customer over to the new network we will write to them asking them to agree an appointment time to be switched; all we need is for customers to react promptly once they receive that letter."