More than 40,000 homes and businesses will be connected to superfast broadband.

Fibre broadband will be rolled out to around 98 per cent of West Sussex homes and businesses within the next three years.

A multi-million partnership project between West Sussex County Council and BT will build on BT’s commercial fibre installation across the county and will provide broadband infrastructure to over 44,000 premises with superfast speeds of at least 24Mbps by the start of spring 2016.

According to Ofcom, the county’s average downstream speed is currently 11.7Mbps while 9.7 per cent of premises receive fewer than 2Mbps.

BT is contributing £7.6 million towards the cost of deployment in “non-commercial” areas while West Sussex County Council is contributing £6.26 million, with £6.26m coming from the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) funds.

Louise Goldsmith, leader of West Sussex County Council, said: “West Sussex County Council is very aware of the problems that slow speeds or in some cases, no broadband at all can cause local businesses and people working and running businesses from home. This was a key rationale behind the council’s decision to invest more than £6 million to provide more access to better, faster broadband across the county. We are now looking to BT, having won the contract, to deliver services to those areas which we know are without.”