Viking FM has exclusively learned K-Com’s dominance in Hull’s broadband market could end within weeks.

We’ve been told a new company, called Fibrestream, has been given permission to start installing fibre optic cables into the city, providing internet, HDTV and phone services.

These are currently only available through K-Com’s Karoo service.

Once installed, users will have speeds of up to 100MB per second download speed. That compares to Karoo’s 8MB a second service, and Lord Carter’s pledge to offer every home has 2MB speed by 2012.

It could mean it would be possible to download and watch an hour long TV programme in around 1 minute.

Guy Jarvis, the CEO of Fibrestream, explains how the technology works:

“Instead of the copper wires which we’ve been using for the last one-hundred years, next-generation access is putting fibre optics in.

“Basically what that involves is putting a number of tubes into the building, and then you have an individual fibre which is about the size of a human hair, which comes into each of the flats” he said.

Great Thornton Street Estate the first to benefit

But superfast broadband won’t be just for the super rich. In fact, we’ve learned the first people to benefit from this new service live on one of the poorest estates in the city.

Fibrestream are making the service available to people on the Great Thornton Street Estate; at first it will be available to around 400 flats on the estate.

They hope then to introduce it to the Orchard Park estate.

“If you look back at Hull over the course of the 20th century, we were very much at the forefront in terms of telecommunications.”

“Part of what we’re doing is a contribution to putting Hull back on the map, and putting us back at the forefront of telecommunications in the 21st century.”