AN authority behind a drive to enable nearly 200,000 premises receive superfast broadband has issued fresh advice to residents and traders with concerns over the speeds they receive.

North Yorkshire County Council said anyone struggling to achieve the 25 megabits per second (Mbps) minimum speeds it had paid BT Openreach to provide should contact its Superfast North Yorkshire scheme to enable an investigation to be launched.

The advice follows concerns being raised over broadband suppliers telling people in areas where superfast broadband technology has been introduced that the minimum speeds remained unachievable.

Councillor Don Mackenzie, the authority’s broadband boss, said the ongoing drive since 2012 to ensure even some of the people across England’s largest county had superfast broadband had been “a success story”.

When Superfast North Yorkshire was formed in 2010, nearly 50,000 business and residential premises received less than 2Mbps – and the average broadband speed of the 300,000 premises in North Yorkshire was under 4Mbps.

He said there could be various reasons other than BT Openreach’s system not working as to why people were not receiving minimum speeds.

Cllr Mackenzie cited hardware and software issues in premises and sites that long distances from a broadband cabinet as potential causes of issues.

He said: “Generally speaking, premises that are more than 1,200 metres from a cabinet will see download speeds drop off.

“If people want to know about the service that they can expect they should visit the Superfast North Yorkshire website. If people have ongoing concerns about speeds we will carry out an investigation for them.”

Cllr Mackenzie said over the past six years Superfast North Yorkshire had overseen the move to enable 25Mbps access across 166,000 properties that would not have been considered commercially viable and £20.5m of work was underway to introduce fibre technology to 14,000 more premises.

He said the scheme had provided exceptional value for money for the taxpayer, with an average subsidy of £204 per premises, which represented the lowest cost in any rural area.