The government has pledged £530 million into superfast rural broadband in the governments Spending Review.
Residents in North Yorkshire, Cumbria, Hertfordshire and the Highlands are the lucky benefactors of the funding which was announced yesterday by the Chancellor George Osborne in his Spending Review. These rural areas were considered commercially un-viable and this scheme looks to trial superfast broadband in them.
The project will be done over the next 4 years with £300 million of the funds coming from the pot left over from the digital TV switch over from the BBC license fee.
It is expected that around 2 million households will benefit from the project which is being run by the government organisation called “Broadband Delivery UK”. The same organisation have been given the responsibility of making sure that everyone in the UK has access to broadband by 2012 and high speed fibre broadband to the majority of the country by 2017.
BT are spending £2.5bn on their own fibre optic network that will be available to around 66% of the country by the time it is complete, Virgin Media also have coverage with their fibre network of around 50% but there will still be areas that are missing out where it does not work out financially viable for BT to roll out this next generation network to.
Next generation mobile broadband spectrums will be auctioned in 2011 or 2012, this will mean more access to mobile broadband, and with at least 500Mhz of public sector airwaves being released over the next 10 years this gives plenty of scope to improve mobile broadband reach.
Plans by Virgin Media, the UK’s largest cable operator are to use telegraph poles and existing ducts to deliver it’s cable broadband services that will be able to deliver broadband speeds up to 50Mb and also it ‘s digital TV services if a trial of the technology to Woolhampton in Berkshire goes well.