North Yorkshire full fibre gets £20.5m
Gigabit broadband speeds will soon be available to an extra 14,000 homes and businesses as North Yorkshire full fibre gets a big rocket up the backside.
The county council and its publicly owned network NYnet have announced a new deal signed with Openreach to roll out faster broadband extending from Kirkby Lonsdale in the west, to Scarborough in the east, south to Pontefract and as far north as Middlesborough.
The vast majority of premises seeing the upgrade – 12,500 – will be connected up to full fibre broadband.
Full fibre, unlike its poorer cousin Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC), can hit symetrical upload and download speeds up to 1Gbps.
FTTC is generally available on the open market and is sold in two types: up to 38Mbps and up to 76Mbps. But the technology is relatively old-hat and uploads are often just one-tenth of with download speeds.
Full fibre, also known as Fibre to the Home, is connected directly to the business or home and so is not affected by speed drops and reliability issues that customers find with Fibre to the Cabinet broadband.
What is NYnet?
NYnet was set up by North Yorkshire County Council in 2007 as a high bandwidth network with core points extending across the county.
Phase three of this planned set of works has been funded with £12.1m from council coffers, alongside £7.3m from the government’s Broadband Delivery UK project and £1m from the European Regional Development Fund.
It’s understood Openreach’s investment to complete the engineering and installation work will top £9.2m.
Many more online
In total 14,239 homes and businesses across North Yorkshire will benefit from access to much more stable download and upload speeds.
In terms of coverage, the rollout will raise the percentage of people in the county able to access fast broadband speeds
from 90% to 95%.
Phase two of the project was completed in December 2017.
The council says it expects phase three to be finished sometime in 2021.
A full list of the communities across North Yorkshire getting the full fibre upgrade should be ready by April 2018. A council spokesman said it is waiting on Openreach for that information.
