Fibre Optic Broadband is spreading throughout Portugal, thanks to a massive investment by Potugal Telecom. It's coming in the next 3 months to Central Portugal.

More and more people are using the Internet, and not just for searching websites. The  number of people dowloading films, music and other large data files is increasing, and the old twisted-pair copper wires cannot cope any more and cannot provide the speeds needed by modern society.

In order to cater for the demands this places on the infrastructure, Portugal Telecom (PT) is upgrading its core network to use fibre optic cables to carry the data.

PT last year (2010) successfully demonstrated a connection operating at 100 MB of bandwidth linking Lisbon and Porto, and some areas around these two cities are already experiencing the fibre optic speeds.

The planned expansion of PT's network requires 300,000km of fibre optic cable. When the infrastructure is in place, the company expects to serve an extra 600,000 homes, on top of its existing one million customers.

You may have seen the roadworks on the sides of many roads in Central Portugal and the Silver Coast (and in the Alentejo and Algarve too) in recent months but our personal expectations were that it would take a long time to reach the villages of central Portugal interior, as everything usually does.

Well it’s nice to be wrong for once...

In Alvaiázere this week there was a man from the company 'Bysat' doing surveys. When asked what he was doing and he told Hey Portugal that he was surveying to install Fiber Optics in the area within the next 3 months, and throughout central Portugal. We have had reports of similar surveys around Tomar and Ferreira do Zezere too.

This is great news for anyone living in or thinking of buying property in central Portugal and the Silver coast.