Marlborough residents can expect faster broadband by the end of the year as part of a multi-billion pound project to bring superfast broadband across Wiltshire.

Matt Lloyd, from BT, spoke at the Marlborough area board meeting on Tuesday night during a presentation about the multi-million pound superfast broadband partnership between Wiltshire Council and BT.

The £30.9m project is bringing superfast broadband to areas that fall outside the private sector’s commercial plans.

The project has benefited from £4.6m from the government’s Broadband Delivery UK scheme on top of the £15.5m invested by Wiltshire Council and £10.8m by BT.

The first village to benefit from this scheme will be Broad Hinton, which is served from Swindon.

Mr Lloyd said: “We’re going to start surveying in Marlborough in the spring when engineers will start looking at the infrastructure and we expect to see services going live on some of the exchange in the Marlborough area towards the back end of the year.

“It’s very difficult for me to say specifically where we are.

"We have an idea of where we want to go, clearly we are in the process of surveying but we should see a large amount of homes passed in Marlborough towards the end of this year and the early part of next year.”

According to Mr Lloyd improving broadband in rural areas throws up more challenges than in urban environments.

“We don’t know the conditions of the existing infrastructure, we have to get power to new cabinets and that’s challenging in a rural setting,” he said.

“In North Yorkshire engineers found a badger sett on a fibre route so that delayed delivery by about three months.”

The partnership aims to provide 91 per cent of homes and businesses in Wiltshire with superfast broadband by March 2016.

More information can be found at www.wiltshire online.org