PEOPLE in parts of the city are set to benefit from access to some of the fastest broadband speeds available as Openreach includes Bradford in the rollout of its Gfast technology.

Around 20,000 homes and businesses in the city centre will soon be able to download a film and share or stream content faster using speeds of up to 330Mbps.

Openreach, the UK's largest telephone and broadband network, has announced the next 81 locations to be upgraded under their ultrafast broadband investment.

The upgrade covers properties serviced by the main Bradford telephone exchange - meaning largely the area inside the ring road is to benefit within the next nine months.

The changes will provide enough bandwidth for a family of four to all all stream ultra HD or 4k quality movies or TV simultaneously.

Openreach’s managing director Kim Mears, said: “We are delighted to be upgrading our network and extending our ultrafast broadband reach to dozens of new locations across the UK, benefitting hundreds of thousands more homes and businesses. The amount people are doing online, often at the same time, is growing every year and the pace shows no sign of slowing. We understand people need to have a fast and reliable connection at home and at work, and our ultrafast broadband network is at the forefront of making that happen.

“Our engineers are working hard to extend the reach of our network as quickly as possible. We’re building the infrastructure Britain needs to stay ahead in the global digital economy, and it’s great that Bradford is able to benefit from our early work.”

As well as making everything happen more quickly, ultrafast broadband also provides greater capacity. This means you can reliably stream music or watch TV, at the same time as other members of your family are using the connection for things like online gaming or social media.

The technology also has huge benefits for small businesses and people working from home, who can do things like video conferencing, with the confidence that their internet connection won’t slow or drop out.

Nearly 27.6 million homes and businesses in the UK can already access Openreach’s fibre network, with a choice of service providers, such as BT, Sky and Talktalk.

Openreach has already made ultrafast broadband – using a mix of technologies - available to more than two million premises across the UK.

This latest work in Bradford uses a technology called Gfast, which builds on existing infrastructure, changing the way broadband signals are transmitted to make them ultrafast without the need to dig up roads and install new cabling all the way to the property.