Goodwin Development Trust Chief Executive Pete McGurn (left) with KC's Nick Thompson

KC is offering residents in high-rise flats in the Great Thornton Street estate in Hull the chance to be amongst the first people in the region to connect to its new super fast fibre optic broadband service.

KC will be installing fibre broadband in five high-rise blocks in Great Thornton Street and Cambridge Street, near Hull city centre, to give customers super fast speeds of up to 80Mbps with unlimited downloads.

Existing Karoo customers in the five blocks who want to take part in a four-month trial of the new service will be upgraded to it free of charge. In return they’ll need to report back to KC to tell them about their experience of the service.

Since KC announced its fibre broadband plans in July, engineers have been busy installing fibre optic cables in the Great Thornton Street area and expect to have the first household connected by the start of November.

KC’s Director of Consumer Services, Nick Thompson, said “We’ve had great feedback from the customers we’ve already connected to our super fast broadband in Woodmansey, where broadband speeds were slower than average because of how far the village is from the nearest telephone exchange. One of my favourite comments is that switching to our new fibre service was like swapping a Reliant Robin for a Ferrari. We’re looking forward to bringing this amazing online experience to many more customers across the region and showing people just what KC super fast fibre optic broadband can offer them.”

KC’s fibre broadband roll-out will pass a total of 15,000 homes across its network during the next 12 months. During this period KC will use several different types of fibre technology to connect a broad range of household types. Its installation in Woodmansey allowed KC to trial Fibre to the Home technology, while in the Great Thornton Street area KC is installing Fibre to the Basement technology. With this technology, fibre is laid from the exchange to the basement of a multi-household property and from there individual households are connected to the fibre using existing copper cables. 

From this week, KC will be contacting customers in the Great Thornton Street area to invite them to take part in the trial. Residents there who aren’t KC broadband customers can also take part in the fibre trial by signing up for a KC Home Bundle, from £29.99 per month.

Pete McGurn, Chief Executive of the Goodwin Development Trust, a social enterprise which was originally set up to improve the quality of life of residents on the estate and which now runs community services and projects across Hull, said: “It’s refreshing – in tough times - to see a major company putting the needs of an often overlooked community at the top of its priority list. It makes it much, much easier for residents – especially the older and vulnerable – to get online access to the services they really need and it also enables us to further promote our range of services to the local community.

“Goodwin looks forward to working with KC to develop a range of services that will help transform the lives of our residents. It’s a win-win scenario for the Thornton Estate.”

Over the next few months KC will also be using a range of fibre technologies to improve broadband speeds in the rural East Yorkshire villages of Benningholme, Swine and Weel, which currently experience slower than average broadband speeds due to their distance from the nearest telephone exchange. KC will also be continuing its fibre installations in the outskirts of Woodmansey before Christmas.

KC will be making announcements about other fibre deployment locations later this year. In the meantime, a demonstration suite in KC’s customer service centre at its main office in Carr Lane is showcasing the new super fast service so customers across Hull and East Yorkshire can drop in to see for themselves how fibre will transform their online experience.

To find out more or sign up for the trial in the Great Thornton Street area people can call KC’s fibre team on 01482 604911 or visit www.kc.co.uk/fibre.