Earl Shilton, Loughborough and Shepshed are among the next Leicestershire locations to get fiber broadband

Full fiber broadband is heading to 14 more towns, villages and city boroughs in Leicestershire as part of a huge broadband upgrade by Openreach. People living in Earl Shilton, Loughborough, Shepshed and 11 other communities are next in line for full fibre.

They join more than 140,000 homes and businesses across the county who already have access to faster and more reliable broadband technology thanks to the work of Openreach.

In the UK, the company has published updated plans to build full fiber broadband to a further 517 locations – covering an additional 2.7 million homes and businesses.

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Earlier this year, Glenfield, Oadby, Beaumont Leys and Ashby were among new full fiber broadband areas.

The full list of places benefiting from full-fibre broadband in the next round are:

• Aylestone
• Belgrave
• Brownstone
• Leicester Haymarket
• East Wigston
• Earl Shilton
• Great Glenn
• Kegworth
• Leiria
• Loughborough
• Osgathorpe
• Shepshed
• Twycross
• West Wigston

Kasam Hussain, regional director for the Midlands, said: “This is a huge infrastructure success story in the East Midlands. No company is building faster or further in Europe that we know of.

“We will not stop either. We plan to build even more across the region, in more towns and cities and in our most rural communities. And our engineers, more than 1,600 of whom live in the region, are doing it at a rapid pace – despite the fact that this is an extremely complex engineering project.

“Our fiber checker has the latest information about our activity in your area. It’s also worth noting that upgrades are not automatic. Once full fiber is available where you live, you’ll need to place an order to connect and we’ll take care of the rest.

“The Openreach network offers the widest range of providers such as BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Vodafone and Zen – meaning people have plenty of choice and can get a great deal.”

All the work is part of Openreach’s £15 billion project to upgrade Britain’s broadband infrastructure – bringing gigabit-capable technology to 25 million homes and businesses by the end of 2026, including 6.2 million in more remote and rural areas.

Rebecca Henson, head of growth at Leicestershire County Council, said: “This is great news for the local area. We know how important full fiber is to everyday life and we welcome the news from Openreach that further construction will start soon.

“More and more services that are important to everyday life are now online, so having greater reliability and faster speeds is a welcome boost.”

Over 4.7 million UK homes and businesses have already switched to Full Fiber and demand continues to flow, with over 50,000 orders placed each week.

Openreach has also refreshed its online map and postcode checker to give a clearer, regularly updated picture of its plans and progress between now and 2026.

The map now shows the current and future levels of full fiber coverage expected today, taking data from all its build programmes, while the postcode checker continues to provide the most personalized view of connectivity available for an individual home or business.

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