North Yorkshire UK Full Fibre Rollout Project Extended to Filey

The North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC) and Nynet have confirmed that their on-going £15.1m project to roll-out a new “gigabit-capable” fibre broadband network (here), which aims to connect 370 public sector sites, has been extended to include the small town of Filey.

The original roll-out plan, which is supported by public funding from the UK Government’s Local Full Fibre Network (LFFN) challenge fund, only planned to include 16 towns and sadly Filey was not one of those. However the deployment progress, which is being handled by the Leeds-based contractor SCD Group, has been good and as a result it’s become possible to add an extra town.

Overall 6 sites will be connected up to the new full fibre network (e.g. the Fire Station, Library and Filey Surgery.), making for a total of 60 across both the Scarborough and Filey area. In fact over 7km of cable has already been laid in the town.

County Councillor Don Mackenzie said:

“This is very good news for Filey and we are very pleased that we have made such good progress with the project to be able to add the town to the initial list of communities in the scheme. The LFFN programme brings about a remarkable upgrade in the county’s digital infrastructure, which will result in major economic benefits and a future-proofed network.”

Separately the Superfast Broadband North Yorkshire (SFNY) project, which has been working with Openreach (BT) to extend “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) via FTTC and FTTP to reach 94% of premises in the county by June 2021 (currently at around 91%), recently completed a new Open Market Review (OMR) to help establish existing and planned (within the next 3 years) coverage of related networks.

Confusingly the local authority now states that “phases 1, 2 and 3 of the projects will see superfast broadband delivered to approximately 90% of the premises within North Yorkshire by June 2021,” which is odd since the original target was 94%+ and they’ve already exceeded the 90% mark. Nevertheless a Phase 4 project is currently being planned to tackle the final few %.

A new state aid consultation has already begun for this (due to complete by 4th June 2020), which reveals that SFNY is “confident that additional funding of around £12.5m (with potential for up to a maximum of £25m) will be available to move towards achieving the Vision of NGA to all premises within the county area.”

We strongly suspect this “additional” funding includes clawback from BT (i.e. public money returned from earlier contracts due to high take-up) and any future contract seems almost certain to focus on Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology (FTTC deployments are being wound-down in favour of full fibre).