Residents and small businesses in Edinburgh can now get some of the fastest internet speeds in the UK after the release of Vodafone’s Gigafast Full-Fibre Broadband.

Gigafast full fibre is currently only available in the Balerno, Restalrig and Liberton areas of the city, but should become city-wide over the next few years.

CityFibre, the country’s largest wholesale fibre network infrastructure provider, will deploy the new broadband service with the goal of connecting eight million homes.

Gigfast is already available in several cities around the UK, but is set to be released in Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Northampton sometime during 2020.

Many home broadband services are based on old telephone lines, but these can be unreliable and cause slower speeds for customers.

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Vodafone’s Gigafast will use all optical-fibre cables at every stage of the connection.

This gives users potential download speeds of 900 Mbps; 16 times faster than with the older lines, as well as upload speeds 125 times faster than the average fixed broadband service.

Gigafast coincides with Vodafone’s roll-out of the ‘The Great British Broadband Switch’, a scheme aimed at getting customers whose contracts have run out to switch providers. In the UK, it is estimated around 8.8 million people are outwith their contract, a fact Vodafone’s scheme is primed to take advantage of.