UK Government pays £363m for rural broadband
The government wants at least a 2Mbit/sec connection available to every home in the UK.
Unsurprisingly, rural areas such as Cumbira, Devon and Somerset - where much of the population is widely distributed - top the list for funding, with urban areas such as London left out due to existing high quality networks provided by the private sector. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have already received their funding.
Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport Jeremy Hunt said 'I urge all those suffering the frustration of slow internet connections to make it clear to your local elected representatives that you expect them to do what is needed to access this investment and to deliver broadband to your community.'
The funding is part of the government's scheme to ensure that by 2015, 90 per cent of UK home and businesses are able to access super fast (24Mb/sec and upward) broadband, with every household able to access a broadband connection of at least 2Mb/sec.
While the investment is sure to see connection speed increase, we can't help but feel that local councils are perhaps not the best equipped to decide on the future of Britain's broadband networks. The decision to allocate funds in this way could result in numerous competing standards and methods to deliver connections, rather than a unified nationwide investment.
There's a full list of the broadband funding for English councils to look through (PDF alert).
Live in the countryside and looking forward to faster broadband? Or dreading the infrastructure upheaval? Either way, let us know in the forum.
Previous Article
29 Comments
Discuss in the forums Replyon broadband upgrades in there area's rich constitutes as well as the areas they personally live in, upgrade the town halls coverage and then spend the rest(95% of the allocated amount) on corporate parties and pay rises(75% increase at minimum) for doing such a wonderful job upgrading the broadband in the area and nope i am not a cynic;)
My main concern is upload speeds. We don't have it at my exchange, which serves most of south east Belfast, but Infinity is pretty much the only option for any form of decent upload speed, and signing up with BT isn't something I would want to do. There needs to be better high end choices.
Whichever way you look at it, £363m will barely touch the sides - it'll take billions. (Looks at the foreign aid budget increasing to £12b per year...).
Also agree that it should be organised nationally. Not so much that I expect there'll be competing standards, (that could be regulated against) but simply for the duplication of effort. Each county will have to organise its own team to deal with this, with its own head, specialists, admin staff etc - what a complete waste of limited resources. A national body could easily liaise with local councils and their specific priorities without having to have 50 duplicates of everything and everyone.
Also, I know it's been done voluntarily in some areas, but how about a little national legislation for the rights to piggyback existing infrastructure? There are enough well placed sewers in most areas to avoid the need to dig up endless new trenches in the roads - and power line poles and pylons could carry a lot of the rest. A small fee could be set nationally to pay the owners for the privilege of using their infrastructure (on a 'per mile' basis for example) - and it would still be a lot cheaper than having to dig everywhere. And it would be a lot faster and a lot less disruptive to roll out as well.
That's the kind of thing that only a national body could realistically organise with any degree of efficiency and success.
It's great in theory giving all the local groups power over everything, but in some situations things simply work better when done nationally.
Personally, I would have preferred this money to fund F1 on the BBC. As people have said, £363m will barely touch the sides for rural broadband, and knowing the government, they'll aim for 2Mbps nationwide as a target.
2Mbps would mean a lot to some people I know back home. I know folk on 256kbps and 512kbps connections who would rather like to be able to download faster than 100KB/s. Things like youtube and iplayer will not function on my parent's ADSL, and even many music streaming services run poorly because their phone line is so far from the exchange (about 7 miles) that the thing just doesn't perform very solidly.
http://i246.photobucket.com/albums/gg117/clan_hunter/USRobotics56KModem5686E.jpg
in london its pretty damn bad, I feel sorry for the rural areas.
There is always going to be a large gulf between in speed both download and upload between urban and rural areas.
What this money is for, is to fund prodjects to 'white areas' that suffer with very low speed, the money will like the first BDUK funds to go out. Will go into open tender for 2 rounds, one of the first areas was.
http://www.cumbria.gov.uk/broadband/whosinvolved/suppliers.asp
In that link you will see the suppliers that are bidding and have made it through to the second round, the contract will start in April next year, so the BDUK funds will take a while to get through but expect to see a similar list of companies for all of the tenders made by the councils.
Me well i'm on 30mb Virgin and live maybe 1 mile from him in Edgeley we also have fttc coming soon.
Comments like that REALLY wind me up, and let me explain why. If you go on samknows, I'm on the EANAY exchange and struggle to get even 90KB/s, (so, as suggested, iPlayer streaming is impossible and even 360p Youtube videos won't run uninterrupted without extensive buffering before playing), and my prospects of getting even a semi-decent connection at my house in the next few years are bleak at best.
But, of course, because there's almost no-one on my exchange in comparison to most, that means my neighbours and I and many other people in my situation should be forgotten about and left even further behind in the broadband race. Therefore the logical consequence is the little money which has become available to potentially improve the situation may as well be scrapped as well and spent on a bit of entertainment which will end up being extensively covered by many other media outlets anyway and which people can pay a few quid a month for if they are that desperate to watch it live.
I can't improve my broadband for love nor money, unless I could buy BT and force them to lay cable to my exchange. Get some perspective before suggesting utterly ridiculous things and frankly kicking sand in the face of fellow bit-tech members.
I've started loosing faith in piped broadband since BT seem pretty reliable at wrecking things. They upgraded my area for infinity and now I get half the speeds I use to! As for all the wi-fi hotspots, they have either disappeared or became gimped to the point theyre too slow to use or not safe to.
You are, I got that in central Aberdeen last year (12 now, wootles).
I can't imagine that this money is going to be spent in areas where anyone actually gets even 1mb just yet though, because there are still a great great many people who's connections are slower than 1 mbit/s.
I'm fairly lucky, getting 14Mb/s down (translating to 1.3-1.4MB/s) and 1.9Mb/s upstream. However I do also remember the days of dialup (5KB/s max download and limited to 1-3 hour sessions depending on the ISP, unless paying for the call yourself) and how much difference even a 256KB/s (30KB/s) ADSL connection made to that. If everyone's online access could be raised to 2Mb/s, then I'd consider ditching overpriced TV events a price well worth paying for it. However £363m is likely to be a first installment rather than the full cost.
They advertise up to 20 meg, but realisticly all you will get is 3 or 4 meg.
And they never seem to offer a ten meg line, so your forced into paying for a 20 meg line you can never get use out of. And why is the government footing the bill for this?, surely it should be the providers paying for infrastructure not the people. Because if the public pay for it, surely then this would lead to extremely good discounts on subscription charges to offset the cost of public spending?
****ing con men.
The good news is that you may be able to improve line speeds by modifying internal phone wiring - see Kitz: Improve your adsl broadband connection speed for more details.
When you have a previous administration that blew and borrowed everything they could, combined with a global recessions, be glad there is funding about.
This money is for white area's, which is needed to help them, the rest will be reached by the market eventually.
Long live talk talk and shitttttty cables.