The incumbent ISP for Hull and surrounding areas in East Yorkshire (England), KC, has today named the next batch of locations that will benefit from its new superfast fibre optic (FTTH and FTTC) based Lightstream broadband products.
So far 17,000 homes and businesses in areas including Kingswood, Greatfield estate and Beverley can already receive the new service and a further 13,000 are expected to go live by the end of 2013. In total KC aims to reach 45,000 local premises with its new service by March 2015 and 3,600 customers have already subscribed (up slightly from 3,500 users and 15k passed in March 2013).
The spring / H1 2013 phase of KC’s roll-out plan was announced last month (here) and the new H2 2013 roll-out areas announced today (full details) include streets around Newland Avenue and Beverley Road (from July 2013), the area around Hessle town centre and First Lane in Hessle (from November 2013), and parts of Brough (from December 2013).
Business locations within the next phase of KC’s roll-out include parts of Hull city centre and Anlaby Road, as well as industrial estates and the surrounding areas at Sutton Fields, Leads Road, Marfleet Road, Bontoft Road, Grovehill Road, Cleveland Street and Wincolmlee; and King George, Queen Elizabeth and Alexandra Docks.
Gary Young, KC’s Business and Consumer Director, said:
“This is the latest phase in our multi-million pound project to give our customers the best-connected homes and businesses in the UK.
The service has been extremely popular among both residential customers and businesses. We’re finding many homes are using it to stream online TV, while businesses are making the most of it to exploit services like cloud computing and videoconferencing, which improve efficiency and flexibility.
We’re looking forward to rolling it out more widely throughout this year and next.”
The Lightstream packages themselves offer speeds of up to 350Mbps (Megabits per second) via KC’s top-end Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) solution and up to 80Mbps where their slower FTTC service is available. It should be noted that KC uses its own FTTH/C solutions and these are not related to BT’s separate roll-out of near identical technology.