KCOM Win 2019 European Broadband Award for Network Quality

The incumbent broadband ISP for Hull and East Yorkshire (England), KCOM, last night scooped the 2019 European Broadband Award for “Quality and affordability of services,” which predominantly reflected their £85m effort to roll-out a new 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network across their patch.

The operator, which was recently acquired by Macquarie Infrastructure following an agreed takeover price of £627m (here), this year completed their FTTP deployment (with a tiny bit of FTTC / VDSL2) to cover their entire UK network (195,000+ premises).

Clearly this impressed the jury of five “European broadband experts” as KCOM promptly picked up the win for “Category 5. Quality and affordability of services.” Another UK project – Digital Scotland Superfast Broadband (DSSB) – was separately short-listed under “Category 4. Demand generation and take-up of connectivity” but didn’t win.

As a winner KCOM will be invited to attend today’s B-Day: Boosting Connectivity Investments conference in Brussels, where they’ll be asked to share their experiences with the audience. On top of that they’ll benefit from being widely promoted via the Digital Single Market web site, in newsletters and other conferences, as well as being displayed in the Broadband Europe good practice database.