A FURTHER 71,000 homes and businesses in Merseyside will have access to super-fast broadband by the end of next year.

Telecoms giant BT announced the latest areas to benefit from its UK-wide £2.5bn roll-out plans for super-fast fibre broadband.

They are: Ainsdale (more than 6,000 homes and businesses), Bromborough (more than 7,000), Eastham (nearly 5,000), Lark Lane (more than 9,000), Prescot (more than 12,000), and Walton (more than 9,000).

Super-fast broadband allows users to send and receive large amounts of data more quickly and efficiently, and to run multiple bandwidth-hungry applications at the same time.

The Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, while welcoming the move, urged BT to get it done as soon as possible.

Chief executive Jack Stopforth said: “It’s incredibly important. We know from most significant direct foreign investment companies coming into the city, that one of the first questions they ask is the quality of telecoms, and particularly broadband.

“If we’re going to be competitive, we’ve got to be up there with the best. It’s not something we can think of compromising on.

“We as a Chamber of Commerce will be leaning on BT to get it done as quickly as possible.”

Super-fast broadband, using “fibre to street cabinet” technology, offers much faster download speeds of up to 40Mbps, potentially rising to 60Mbps, and upstream speeds of 10Mbps, which could rise to 15Mbps in the future.

BT, through its local network business arm Openreach, expects to make super-fast fibre broadband available to two-thirds of the UK by the end of 2015.

Professor Dennis Kehoe, chief executive of AIMES Grid Services – who has previously described Liverpool as a “digital desert”– said it was “unequivocally good news for the city.”

His company, based at Liverpool Innovation Park, on Edge Lane, announced this week that it would shortly be launching a new super-fast broadband service for businesses in Liverpool, creating the city’s first “digital exchange.”