NYnet brings benefits of high fibre diet to the EU

Businesses in rural areas pay more for network access than in urban areas

The North Yorkshire-based NYnet public-private sector partnership has been chosen as consultants to a major new European Commission initiative known as the B3 Regions: Regions for Better Broadband Connection (PDF).

Designed to improve network connectivity to the internet and other IT systems throughout the European Union, the initiative launches today in York, and will run for 26 months sharing best practice from eight other EU-based partner organisations. It will be funded to the tune of €3.5m.

NYnet said that the initiative seeks to "redress the imbalance and combat the documented social and economic disadvantages of poor internet access by transferring existing good practices, as demonstrated by NYnet, throughout the EU member states".

NYnet was chosen after its implementation of an optical fibre network which allowed service providers to supply broadband to about 330,000 residential customers, and 50,000 small to medium sized firms and small office/home office locations, in the region, covering Craven, Hambleton, Harrogate, Richmondshire, Ryedale, Scarborough, Selby and York.

"We have a ring of 12 core points of presence [POPs] located in North Yorkshire's main market towns, connected by optical fibre with a total bandwidth capacity of 32Gbit/s," said Andy Lister, marketing director at NYnet.

"If we exceed that, I know that Cisco has electronics that can up that to 320Gbit/s on the fibre we have by just swapping out the end electronics devices. "

Lister added that NYnet's 12 POPs are connected to another 28 smaller POPs which could supply bandwidth from 100Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s to public sector sites and business parks, which would then pass on bandwidth between 2Mbit/s and 100Mbit/s to end users.

NYnet would provide better value for public sector services than is currently obtainable, and farm out excess capacity to the private sector, according to the organisation.