First Customers Live on KCOM’s New £100m FTTP Expansion

Last month saw Hull-based UK ISP KCOM unveil a new £100m project to extend the coverage of their 1Gbps Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network into new parts of East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire (here and here). This week the provider has connected their first customer in Driffield to the new network.

Previously KCOM’s full fibre network covered c.200,000 premises across their patch of East Yorkshire and the city of Hull, where they’ve tended to dominate. But all that has begun to change since last year’s £627m takeover by Macquarie Infrastructure (MIRA / MEIF 6 Fibre), which pledged to grow their FTTP beyond its traditional network footprint (here).

Driffield, Nafferton and Market Weighton are in the first phase of this rollout, which will initially make “ultrafast broadband” speeds accessible to around 10,000 properties, with more locations across East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire set to be announced throughout 2020.

The good news is that they’ve made rapid progress and as a result the first customer to benefit – Beverley Fielding – has now gone live in the market town of Driffield.

Mr Fielding, of the Greenways (Driffield), said:

“We coped before but it was a bit laggy and it could be frustrating at times. You could definitely tell it slowed down when there was more than one person using the internet. Now we’ve got fibre it’s going to make a big difference – hopefully there will be no more arguments about who’s online. We’ll now be able to get the whole family doing their own thing on the internet without it slowing down or grinding to a halt.”

End.