North Yorkshire now has 97% superfast broadband coverage thanks to NYNet.
In 2011 North Yorkshire County Council was successful in bidding for funding to rollout superfast broadband into areas of the county that had not been covered by commercial providers. The County Council had already created NYNet as a company in order to aggregate broadband across the public sector and there were clear synergies resulting in the creation of NYNet 100. NYNet 100 was created to provide the key resource to carry out procurement and contract management for the phases in order to address areas of broadband “not-spots” across North Yorkshire.
Councillor Mark Crane, an unpaid director of the company, takes on the story:
A series of subsequent procurements were carried out and coverage of superfast broadband across North Yorkshire now stands at 97 percent. Phase 4 was the final contract administered by NYNet 100 on behalf of North Yorkshire Council. The government has now assumed responsibility for the roll-out of further tranches of superfast broadband through the Project Gigabit initiative. It is therefore timely for the council to consider winding-up NYNet 100 as a separate company, leaving NYNet as a stand-alone wholly owned trading company.
North Yorkshire Council's Corporate Director of Resources is Gary Fielding:
The County Council had provided significant levels of funding to supplement funding from government through BDUK and European grant funding. The Council has deployed agreed funding as well as using “overage” generated by BT (the contractors in Phases 1, 2 and 3) when take up of broadband had been in excess of a commercial break even position. In other words, public subsidy was paid back when it was proven that there was a sufficient commercially viable demand for service. The Council has benefited tremendously from this provision in the contract and this has been unique in England for BDUK sponsored schemes.
Gary says the company has been financially-shrewd:
Overage funding has currently amounted to £27.58m with a further £4m estimated to be received this year. As identified above, a significant share has been used in order to match fund for the furtherance of super-fast broadband but funds remain available for the Council to use on infrastructure.
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