Rural broadband set for £362m boost
This article reveals “Millions of Britons living in rural areas are set to benefit from faster internet speeds after the government allocated £362m to improve broadband connections in England and Scotland.The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said on Tuesday that the fund would ensure that 90% of hard-to-reach communities with “painfully slow” internet speeds could have access to superfast broadband by 2015.Remote villages in areas of regions such as Cumbria and the Scottish Highlands where it is currently hard to load a simple web page, should be able to download or stream high-quality movies within four years.English counties will get £294m and Scotland £68.8m to bring high-speed internet to areas not catered for by the private sector. The allocations come out of the £530m “digital Britain” fund commitment by the chancellor, George Osborne, earlier this year.”
These sound like big sums – but Malcolm Corbett of INCA (who is speaking at our free Broadband seminar in East Riding later (6 March 2012) in the year put things into perspective in his comments to the BBC about the announcement – “That equates to around £70 per house or business while the cost of fibre is £1,000 per premises so there is a disparity between what the government is putting in and what it will actually cost to provide a future-proofed solution,” he said