Landlord Information

Hornet is a university-run service, providing Internet access to over 15,000 rooms in Halls of Residences within the Manchester area.

If your a hall owner with a residence, which has more than 60 rooms, Hornet will be the most effective method of delivering high speed internet connections to your tenants, please see more information on becoming a Hornet partner.

As a response to demand from many students living within the residential sector, at the beginning of 2008, the University in partnership with INUK is launching a new service, HornetPLUS which moves beyond Halls to provide broadband, phone and TV services to private residential housing in and around Manchester.

Following the presentation on the HornetPLUS Service in December 2007, Debbie* (a Manchester Student Homes landlord) made a decision to go with HornetPLUS and pay for the line rental to each of her properties thus allowing her students to overlay HornetPLUS broadband as they choose. She spoke to some current tenants and prospective residents and discovered some objections to Hornet.

It turns out that the students' only concern with Hornet (the Internet service provided in halls of residence) is due to the fact that the university service restricts their ability to download music and film files. This practice is in breach of copyright and the university cannot support it. After her conversation with the students and their negative feedback on the download issue though, she had decided to pay for a BT line and erroneously believed that the students would be able to buy broadband separately with them.

After speaking again with the HornetPLUS team, she now understands that HornetPLUS like every other commercial service is unable to place these same restrictions on download use, so the objection that her students had does not actually exist. Debbie also knows that the only way she can just offer a line and have the students pay for their own broadband is if she chooses HornetPLUS. Her exact words were "HornetPLUS is back at the top of my list".

The HornetPLUS Commercial Manager is available to conduct property visits and surveys and talk to landlords about their options for providing the HornetPLUS service. Click here for contact details.

*Name of landlord has been changed for anonymity.