Prof Dennis Kehoe of AIMES 300

AIMES chief executive, Professor Dennis Kehoe, said: “Liverpool all of a sudden will become a high fibre connected city, not only enabling local businesses to benefit, but also attracting the trialing of new services, making Liverpool a digital destination, which it has not been previously. We will be able to compete with Manchester and on a national level.”

Liverpool City Council’s existing fibre network forms a ring around the city centre that links LIP with the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, the city’s universities, the business district, the Baltic Triangle and the region’s new enterprise zone covering Liverpool and Wirral Waters. The ring is currently principally used for CCTV for traffic control. Virgin’s new switching equipment will connect directly to a high capacity transatlantic cable that lands in Britain in Southport.

Fibrenet will have a capacity of 10 gigabytes per second and, according to AIMES, could save businesses up to 80% of the typical cost of a much slower 10 megabyte broadband service.

Liverpool is one of just five locations selected by the TSB to trial digital exchanges. Around 30 other places had applied to take part in the trial.