90 Million Buys South Yorkshire Broadband

90 Million Buys South Yorkshire Broadband

Superfast broadband has arrived in South Yorkshire, courtesy of an ambitious £90 million investment plan. The guaranteed 25Mbits/sec fibre-to-the-cabinet IT service will cover 500,000 homes and 40,000 businesses when work is completed in 2012 - though Thales, the IT company installing the network, hopes to provide IT connectivity to the first homes in early 2010.
The network is being funded by a £30 million grant from the European Regional Development Fund and £13.6 million from the Yorkshire Forward development agency. The rest is being supplied by Yorkshire, Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster councils, who are aiming to recoup their costs by offering wholesale access to the network to ISPs.