RYAN Battle, managing director of YouFibre, one of our Level Up campaign partners, looks at the key role broadband plays in levelling up.

Levelling up is hard work and even harder still when there is a global pandemic. Every time we think it’s going away we realise how far-reaching its effects are.

One of the great contributors to levelling up is good broadband. For years, where it is fast and reliable, it has provided access to work, contact with friends and loved ones and entertainment opportunities we never dreamt of 20 years ago. And, if anything, the pandemic has brought broadband even nearer to the centre of society as the levelling-up tool.

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Despite the difficulties of lockdown, broadband has enabled so many of us to see and hear each other, watch limitless entertainment and keep on working. Imagine that the pandemic had occurred as recently as the 80s? Society would have ground to a halt or we’d have had to risk more contact, more illness and more fatalities.

We have heard so many times from our customers (now numbering over 4000) that their previous broadband connection, over copper, was holding them back with families locked down at home, competing for bandwidth to work online, stream entertainment and game, simultaneously.

Netomnia has already laid over 1,300 kilometres of fibre-to-the-premises that YouFibre customers benefit from a permanent, fast connection that has levelled them up, and in many cases pushed them ahead, particularly in the North East, where an infrastructure upgrade was most needed.

Through the pandemic we have built a team of 80 people across Netomnia and YouFibre and work with our partners, employing over 350 more people to deliver and maintain the network. We aim to helped bring prosperity and a further potential to level up and leap ahead.

We have big plans for expansion in 2022. And whatever happens we know that we can push ahead with them, no matter what Covid-19 throws at us.

 

To join the Northern Echo's Level Up campaign, contact diane.searle@localiq.co.uk