KC Bring 78Mbps Broadband to 350 Homes in Wawne – East Yorkshire

KC’s roll-out of ‘Lightstream’ superfast broadband technology in East Yorkshire (England), which is dominated by their 350Mbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP/H) network (with some slower FTTC), is slowly moving outside of Hull and has now reached 350 homes in the small-ish civil parish village of Wawne (Waghen).

The village resides more than 3 miles (around 5km) from the nearest telephone exchange, which means that until recently most locals were forced to suffer from some fairly slow broadband speeds. KC has already done a few other areas like this but such deployments are now becoming more common.

KC won’t say how bad things were before, but at 5km most ADSL and ADSL2+ lines would probably be into sub-2Mbps (Megabits per second) territory. Naturally this somewhat assumes that the actual copper line length is probably longer than the stated straight-line distance and that older rural homes often have poor wiring.

But happily more than 350 local homes along the streets of Main Road, Church Road, Meaux Road, Glebe Road and Greens Lane can now expect to receive Internet download rates of up to 78Mbps (perhaps suggesting that KC opted to use FTTC). The total population of Wawne is around 1,000 people and so the indications are that the majority will benefit.

Jonathan Owen, Local Councillor, said:

“We’re all increasingly reliant on broadband in many areas of our lives, but in many areas of the UK people who live beyond urban areas receive slower speeds than those available in cities. It’s good to see that KC’s roll-out of superfast fibre technology is helping to ensure that this isn’t the case locally.”

At the time of writing KC has already made their local fibre optic based broadband network available to 32,000 homes and businesses, with 9,000 customers connected (28% uptake), and the aim is to cover 45,000 (premises passed) by March 2015. A deployment update published in May 2014 has already revealed their roll-out plan to the end of 2014 (here).