The state-aid backed Superfast North Yorkshire (SFNY) project, which was supported by £100m of investment (£85m from public sources), has finally reached completion and helped more than 200,000 extra premises to access faster broadband speeds via a mix of different technologies (FTTC, FTTP, Fixed Wireless etc.) and operators (Openreach and Quickline).
The SFNY project was managed by NYnet (i.e. the North Yorkshire County Council-owned broadband company) and financed by a mixture of funds from the Government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency, EU, North Yorkshire County Council and some private funding from network suppliers. At the last check in 2022, take-up in the project’s intervention area had already exceeded 80%.
Regular readers might recall that Openreach completed their build contracts under the scheme in 2022 (here), which deployed a mix of fibre-based (FTTC and FTTP) networks to expand the reach of “superfast broadband” (30Mbps+) lines into digitally disadvantaged areas (i.e. usually rural locations where there were no commercial builds being planned). This accounted for the lion’s share of the project’s roll-out.
In addition, Quickline also held a contract to deliver the final Phase 4 of the SFNY roll-out (here), which involved a public and private investment of £14.5m and saw the operator extending their “fibre-backed fixed wireless” network to bring “superfast, ultrafast and in some cases gigabit speed broadband” to a further 15,830 premises. But the latest announcement states that this has now also completed.
However, the council’s leader, Cllr Carl Les, warned that a connectivity gap remain and he has thus pledged to petition the Government to “ensure every household and business in the county has access to superfast internet“.
Councillor Carl Les said:
“The need to have access to superfast broadband is now part of everyday life for communities and businesses across the country.
We have had particular issues in North Yorkshire, which is largely down to the vast rural areas in the county. The superfast broadband programme in North Yorkshire has been instrumental in providing far better connections for tens of thousands of people.
It has given a strong foundation for attracting new enterprises as well as helping to ensure that rural communities can remain sustainable in the future.”
Matthew Lovegrove, Openreach’s Manager for Yorkshire and the Humber, said:
“The success of the Superfast North Yorkshire partnership is a great achievement and testament to the team who have worked so hard for the past 12 years.
Our own commercial build is currently building full fibre at pace across the county including Richmond, Skipton, Malton, Starbeck, Pickering, Selby, Scarborough and Harrogate with the services available to nearly half the premises in North Yorkshire. It’s part of our commitment to reach 25 million homes and businesses across the UK by December 2026.”
Quickline CEO, Sean Royce, added:
“The delivery of the Superfast North Yorkshire programme means thousands more homes and businesses, can now access much improved broadband speeds which will change their lives for the better.”
The focus for future deployments has now switched to the more centrally (government) managed Project Gigabit contract (Lot 31) for North Yorkshire, which is worth £73.5m and has already been awarded to Quickline (here). As part of that the network operator plans, over the next few years, to roll-out their gigabit-capable broadband network to cover an additional 36,300 premises in some of the hardest-to-reach areas of the county.