Openreach (BT) has today reminded people that they don’t just roll-out their 330Mbps Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) broadband network in urban areas and have now connected around 70 communities in North Yorkshire to the service (reflecting 7,800+ premises), many of which are rural.
At present the operator is still in the early stages of their plan to expand the reach of pure fibre optic FTTP connectivity to 2 million UK premises by 2020 (here). As a result many of their related deployments in North Yorkshire (England) have separately been achieved via the local Broadband Delivery UK and State Aid supported Superfast North Yorkshire (SFNY) project.
The North Yorkshire scheme is currently working alongside BT to make “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) services available to around 91% of local premises by June 2017 and the next phase after that (Phase 3) is likely to aim for nearly 96% by mid-2019.
As an example of this work Openreach has confirmed that they’ve just rolled out FTTP to 60 homes in the small rural Richmondshire village of Thornton Rust, which appears to be quite remote. Due to this the village lies too far from BT’s local telephone exchange to benefit from their usual ‘up to’ 40-80Mbps Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) fix.
Tom Keeney, BT’s Director for Yorkshire and the Humber, said:
“Fibre-to-the-premises technology is just one of the ways we can overcome the challenges of reaching more remote, less populated communities like Thornton Rust and demonstrates our commitment to making high-speed fibre broadband as widely available as possible.”
The only downside to FTTP is of course the lack of affordable non-business focused consumer ISP choices, although naturally BT have some reasonably priced unlimited usage packages and Zen Internet also offer a few worthy options. On the upside, FTTP is a lot faster and its top speed will soon be boosted to 1000Mbps.
Meanwhile Phase 1 and 2 of the £34.5m SFNY project claims that its joint effort with BT has so far helped to bring superfast broadband to 182,667 homes and businesses across the county and another 15,000 are due to be added between now and mid-2017. The next Phase 3 roll-out, which will push up to the 95-96% coverage target, is expected to cost £20.5m.
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