CorbyGate is to become the ‘jewel in the crown’ of high-tech Northamptonshire business parks and a gleaming example of public and private partnership enterprise in action as the County Council opens up competition to introduce high-speed broadband to the five-acre site to reduce pressure on the public purse.
Coventry-based WarwickNet, one of the UK’s fastest-growing business grade broadband providers, is the first private company to invest in the park and offer its services across Northamptonshire as part of the County Council’s ambition to have super-fast connectivity across all of its 60 business parks by 2017.
This means that the park, which has 55 tenants located within the massive Weldon Road Industrial Estate, is poised to lift the image of Corby from former ‘steel town’ to centre of excellence for high-tech industry.
Sarah Naylor, Northamptonshire County Council’s programme overview manager for broadband, said: “This initiative to get private businesses to invest in the county helps put Northamptonshire on the business map and also reduces the dependence on the council tax payer’s money to achieve this ambitious aim.
“We are delighted that the scheme has attracted companies such as WarwickNet because they have a strong reputation and a desire to expand into new areas and markets, which is good for them and good for Northamptonshire.”
Previously businesses on the park could rely on just one or two megabits (Mbits) of broadband capacity, but the cabinets put in place by WarwickNet will significantly boost performance as speeds start at 40Mbits.
CorbyGate tenants PA Geotechnical, which uses cloud-based IT to provide engineered solutions for contaminated land, has already benefited from the upgrade in speed.
Stuart Duffy, supply chain manager at PA Geotechnical, said: “We rely upon fast connection to download large land plans. The support we have had from WarwickNet has meant that the speed has dramatically increased which has had a huge impact upon our productivity. We are no longer waiting for the images to download. In the past this would have taken several minutes, or even longer. It is now instantaneous.”
Andrew Smeaton, for CorbyGate Management, said: “We are grateful to WarwickNet for their support and commitment which has enabled this established business park to offer improved broadband speeds across the estate and thereby progress into the modern age.
“Consequently, CorbyGate is no longer in a technological backwater. This move will considerably improve our levels of service and re-establish the park as a prime location for local businesses.”
Ben King, managing director of WarwickNet, said: “We have built a strong reputation in and around our Midlands base, but the Northamptonshire initiative was a business opportunity that takes us into a new level of county-wide service that not only adds value to the business recipients of super-fast broadband, but also to the council taxpayers of Northamptonshire who benefit from the service at no cost, ahead of many other counties in the UK. We are pleased to be working with forward-thinking local authorities and hope to showcase our work here and replicate it in other parts of the country.”
