North Yorkshire UK Prep Fibre Broadband and Rural WiFi Boost

The North Yorkshire County Council is reportedly preparing to start a new scheme worth £3m, which among other things will rollout a free public WiFi network across 16 of the county’s “rural” market towns – stretching from Scarborough to Skipton. Ultrafast full fibre broadband will also be deployed to 6 rural business parks.

According to the Yorkshire Post, the NYCC sees the Wi-Fi deployment as being a useful tool for helping to promote local shops and services, while also being something that could support local residents during the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e. not everybody has access to good broadband at home).

On top of that the programme will help, via NYnet (the council’s wholly owned delivery partner), to deploy “ultrafast fibre broadband” to six business parks – benefiting c.500 businesses – as part of an extension to their existing £15.1m Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) scheme (here); this originally only aimed to connect 370 public sector sites to a gigabit-capable fibre optic style network.

The parks earmarked to receive the technology are likely to be in the districts of Ryedale, Hambleton, Richmondshire and Scarborough, but the council says it would welcome an approach from any business park manager or owner interested in such an opportunity.

The funding for all this looks set to come from the York & North Yorkshire Local Enterprise Partnership (YNY LEP), which was last year allocated an additional £15.4 million from the UK Government’s new £900m Getting Building Fund (GBF).

Greg White, Executive Council Member for Digital, said:

“For the county to make best use of its natural assets, it must not just embrace digital connectivity but lead the way in rural applications of digital connectivity.

Both the deployment of ‘smart places’ technology and extending the full fibre network will enable this to happen. It will be an important step towards rebalancing the relationship between urban and rural communities as well as unleashing the creativity and innovation we know exists here in the market place.”

We should point out that a large number of other Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEP) across England also received funding to help improve local broadband and internet connectivity services (among many other things) as part of the GBF scheme. In other words, we’ll soon start to see more announcements like this as related projects are finalised.