It doesn’t have a pub, a corner shop or even a phone box, but the tiny hamlet of Bentley is the latest location to have access to KC’s superfast Lightstream broadband service after East Riding of Yorkshire Council leader Councillor Stephen Parnaby officially connected it recently.
Bentley, located two and a half miles south of Beverley, has just 10 homes. While such small villages elsewhere in the UK might expect to find themselves towards the end of the queue when it comes to superfast broadband access, KC’s roll-out of Lightstream across its network is covering both urban and rural areas.
Around 30,000 households and businesses across Hull and East Yorkshire have access to the service, including large areas of Beverley, and the East Riding villages of Weel, Swine, Paull, Brantingham and Woodmansey.
It offers guaranteed download speeds that include 100Mbps (megabits per second) and the UK’s fastest fibre service at 350Mbps.
Bentley residents Rod and Trish Bentley, were the first residents to connect to the service when it became available and chose a package with a download speed of 75Mbps.
Mr Bentley said:
“Located where we are, we thought that it was unlikely that we would have the opportunity of receiving high speed broadband for some time, so when we were offered Lightstream we jumped at the opportunity.”
“We’re delighted with the improved performance – our broadband speed has jumped from about 3Mbps to at least 75Mbps almost anywhere in the house, so the system response time is now extremely rapid.”
“Streaming live TV or watching programmes on iPlayer or videos on YouTube takes only seconds to start and there is no buffering, and downloading audio books now only takes about a minute compared with half an hour or more before.”
Councillor Parnaby said:
“Superfast broadband is an increasingly important service, but in many areas of the UK a digital divide exists, with rural communities missing out on the benefits high speed internet access delivers.”
“It’s good to see KC investing in the region as a whole and supporting our ambitions to make superfast broadband available right across our county.”
KC’s roll-out of its Lightstream service is the largest deployment of Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) technology in the UK and one of just a handful of FTTP deployments across Europe.
FTTP gives much faster download speeds than other fibre broadband services because fibre is connected directly to a customer’s home or business.
While the top download speed offered by KC is 350Mbps, fibre deployments in most other parts of the UK deliver slower speeds of up to 78Mbps, because the fibre is not installed all the way to customers’ properties. Instead, it is laid to street cabinets and existing copper cables are used to complete the connection to customers’ premises.
KC engineering director, Andy Whale, said:
“The distances involved in installing fibre to the premises in rural areas can make the process challenging, but our investment in rolling out superfast broadband is about giving our customers the best connected homes and businesses in the UK, wherever they live.”
To check if Lightstream is available in your postcode area visit www.kc.co.uk/lightstream
