The incumbent internet and phone provider for Hull and East Riding (Yorkshire, UK), KC (Karoo), has today officially started connecting the first of 330 customers in Woodmansey to their new superfast 100Mbps fibre optic broadband ( FTTH ) technology trial, which will last for six months.

It's expected to take approximately two months to connect all of the trial users up and further locations will be announced as deployment spreads. Eventually KC hopes to make its new service, which technically began earlier this month (see the video of KC's fibre optic deployment), available to 15,000 homes in the region.


Woodmansey is apparently viewed by KC as being one of the region's most "technically challenging areas" for the delivery of fast broadband. At present local customers can only receive average download speeds of just 1-2Mbps because they reside too far away from the local telephone exchange for anything better.

KC's Network Upgrade Programme

• In May 2010 KC announced it was investing £4m to upgrade its network to prepare it for the anticipated continued growth in bandwidth usage amongst consumers.

• Work carried out as part of the network investment since then includes the upgrade of broadband equipment in KC’s 14 local exchanges and the installation of a new core Internet Protocol (IP) network with a much greater capacity than the previous Asynchronous Transmission Mode (ATM) network.

• Further upgrade work has been carried out in areas of Hull and East Yorkshire where long distances from the nearest exchange meant that broadband download speeds were slower than 2Mbps. In most of these areas, fibre has now been laid between the exchange and local street cabinets [ FTTC ], leading to typical download speeds of 18Mbps.

• KC has also upgraded its street cabinets in all the East Yorkshire villages it serves. The upgrades mean much faster and more reliable broadband for people living in these villages, with the average broadband speed for customers now over 18Mbps.

• Finally, KC has partnered with leading [content delivery] network infrastructure provider Akamai to install new equipment which means the most popular websites used by Karoo customers now load up to 10 times faster than before.

It's important to stress that some reports of this development have misleadingly claimed that all of Woodmansey's trial customers will be connected to a fully fibre optic Fibre-to-the-Home ( FTTH ) service. In fact just under half of the 330 homes will get a slower connection via Fibre-to-the-Cabinet ( FTTC ), which is what BT also uses to deliver download speeds of up to 40Mbps.