emPSN have completed the Rural Gigabit Connectivity, securing full fibre gigabit services to 126 schools in Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland, and their communities.
Our Project
The project launched in May 2019, with the primary aim to identify and connect rural or remote schools to an ultrafast, ‘future proof’ next generation full fibre gigabit capable internet connections which can reduce costs, improve access to high quality online teaching and learning resources, and save time through more efficient ways of working. The upgrade would also benefit the surrounding community with increased access to a gigabit full fibre connections.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) grant funded the programme with the logistics support of the Department for Education (DfE). Grant funding of circa £4.4m was made available for a new full fibre cable connection to each school: without the grant funding such a service would be too expensive providing the main barrier to accessing better, faster provision to support teaching and learning – this is a particular problem in rural locations. Ongoing service charges (line rental) for the new faster service continue to be paid for by the school, often at the same cost or even lower cost that their previous service.
Here’s what our customers say about the new improved service
“Our Academy was selected for the Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) Programme. This has given us the opportunity to have faster connectivity in a rural area. We are so pleased with the connection we have now, and the children are benefiting from it so much. We are fortunate to have laptops for every child and before we were upgraded, when a class of 24 children were on the laptops it used to suck all the internet and crash etc, now we don’t even notice when everyone is on. The installation went really smoothly there were no issues. A BIG THANK YOU to EMPSN for arranging all this and enabling us to have a better internet experience”. (School 1)
“Since we have upgraded the broadband, we have found we have been receiving a much faster and stable connection in school. Even with all pupils and teacher online the speed doesn’t ever seem to be affected. Perfect for the current virtual world!” (School 2)
