Photo shows: Engineers laying a cable as part of a community dig near Fell End Cumbria.

Connecting Cumbria is one of the biggest telecoms engineering programmes the county has ever seen. Openreach, BT’s local network business will lay around 3,900 kilometres of optical fibre cable and install a total of around 550 new fibre broadband cabinets throughout the county during the entire programme. It is estimated that engineers will complete over a million man hours of work planning and building the network during the lifetime of the project. Connecting Cumbria will enable 93 per cent of Cumbrian properties to have access to high-speed fibre broadband by the end of 2015 and other properties to get speeds of at least two megabits per second.

The Connecting Cumbria partnership builds on BT’s commercial rollout, which will bring high-speed broadband to more than 112,000 homes and businesses across Cumbria by the end of this Spring 2014.

For further info contact: BT Regional Press Office on 0800 085 0660. All our news releases can be found at www.btplc.com/news