North Yorkshire County Council in £42.4m broadband contract

Some 500 locations in North Yorkshire including schools, libraries and council offices are set to profit from a new ten year broadband contract just announced by North Yorkshire County Council. The £42.4m contract was awarded to NYnet after a three year period which saw eight other prospective bidders pursuing the contract.

The Yorkshire Post article approximates that the expenditure of this rank of IT provision would be approximately double without the NYnet project and additional savings might be achievable if the North Yorkshire Police and NHS trusts sign up to the plan.

NYnet’s sales and marketing manager, Andy Lister stated “North Yorkshire has suffered in the past because of its rural locations – no-one wanted to provide high speed internet access because it was not seen as profitable as targeting towns or cities. But the NYnet project means that we can realistically attract a whole host of new business. It will also provide major savings to taxpayers – especially if other councils and organisations like the police and NHS sign up.”

The NYnet core is a fibre network linking collectively the chief population centres in North Yorkshire and is a public and private sector business enterprise intended to provide services to businesses, public sector bodies and residents in the area. The existence of a fibre network does not signify people living in North Yorks can anticipate a fibre to the home connection, but it ought to change the economics such that network providers may discover that exchanges once uneconomic to unbundle are now practicable, escalating the choice of services.

For communities with a local library, a public access service that is not reliant on ADSL or the local telephone exchange may well prove positive at times when peoples broadband connections collapse due to faults or when moving home.