West Mids to profit from £830m broadband push
Rural communities in the West Midlands are set to benefit from a £830m government investment to ensure the UK has the fastest broadband in Europe by 2015. Phill Wells, Advantage West Midlands’ head of IT and NGA strategy, is leading the largest new broadband pilot scheme in Hereford. He told Insider that the decision to invest the money, which will create a ‘digital hub’ in each community, would allow rural areas “to come to market” with the bigger cities.
The projects are being overseen by Broadband Delivery UK, a division of BIS.
Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt launched the new programme which includes the creation of a ‘digital hub’ in every community by the end of this Parliament. A further £50m will be invested in a second wave of projects to test how the government will deliver the scheme.
Wells told Insider that the team behind the Hereford pilot hoped to phase in activity in excess of 24 megabites “before the end of next year”. There are four new pilot sites across the country in Hereford, North Yorkshire, the Scottish Highlands and Cumbria. The official target for completed, countrywide super-fast broadband is in 2014.
“We’re really pleased with today’s announcement of further investment,” said Wells. “We really want to get the project up and running, and get it started so that we can all get the benefits.
“Advantage West Midlands has been campaigning for this to happen for the last three years. We think it’s so important to keep a source of rural employment in the region. This investment will really allow rural businesses to go to market with those in the big cities, with much fewer disadvantages.”
The project aims to deliver superfast broadband to 90 per cent of the country.
Raj Mack, the head of creative agency Digital Birmingham, said that faster broadband speeds will enable citizens to access a "broader and richer" quality of content for entertainment and education.
"Whilst download speeds are increasing, upload speeds are still only a fraction (in many cases one tenth) of the download speeds," he said.
"In an age where user interaction is now the norm, we need to ensure that there is greater surety of them getting advertised speeds and a move away from "speeds up to" offering.
"For businesses in our digital district area of Digbeth/Eastside, fast upload speeds are an essential element of their future growth and development opportunities, and that's why Birmingham's ambition is to establish a generational step in the digital infrastructure by delivering 100mbps symmetrical speeds."
At the project launch, Hunt said: “The UK is already in a relatively strong position, with one of the most competitive broadband markets in the world. More than 70 per cent of households subscribe to broadband and nearly 50 per cent of all homes have access to a superfast 50Mbps service.
“Market solutions will continue to drive forward the UK broadband network, but for those communities that cannot access a good level of connectivity, public investment will be used to support local authority broadband development plans."
