Suggestion that all of the UK should follow Scottish broadband lead
Friday 28 March 2008 17:16:35 by Andrew Ferguson
The Broadband Reach Project in Scotland is continuing with the Scottish Parliament due to award a £3.5 million contract to a company who will then work to fill in the gaps broadband coverage.
Computer Weekly has revealed that the Enterprise minister Jim Mather believes that businesses could be offered high speed broadband more quickly if a similar scheme to the Scottish Reach Project was copied around the various regions of the UK. The incentive for this being projections that the gross value added to Scotland's economy in 2015 is likely to be £2bn to £6bn higher due to business take-up of broadband.
The scheme received roughly 3,000 registrations from people who could not get broadband currently and four firms are in the final running for the contract to come up with solutions that will get these people a broadband connection.
It will be interesting to see what solutions are chosen for deployment and the feedback from businesses and people who get broadband. Many of the solutions could be re-used across other parts of the UK where the cable modem and telephone networks do not reach.
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Lucky scots... English parliment dont seem to take broadband seriously at all they have plenty of gob but no action.
all they care about here is their pockets and their business buddies pockets.
dont be surprised if we hire some rich business man to do some research on the idea and hes paid a decent wad for doing it.
Carpetburn, you should remember that the Scots get a lot of extra money from Westminster for no university fees, no prescription charges, better broadband etc, etc.
We can't afford these things in England.
Please bear in mind that this has no connection with a Scottish PM and many Cabinet members!
The idea that £3.5m is going to solve the Notspots in Scotland is not true. The figure we are told is in excess of £20m but the Scottish Government has only promised £3.5m so far, so many places are going miss out.
We have to wait and see if we one of those areas or find we are going to be stuck with a dial-up service for the foreseeable future.
quote "Carpetburn, you should remember that the Scots get a lot of extra money from Westminster for no university fees, no prescription charges, better broadband etc, etc."
So let me get this right, you believe that tripe you wrote?
We up here get TAXED as well you know, Westminister does NOT pay for our health care, we do, same with our Education system (ever heard of council tax?), and as for us having better broadband due to westminiter handouts? what planet you from? :/
6625 we can afford what we want it comes down to if parliament decides to spend money on it, eg. they cant afford £10000 for one thing but can afford 130billions for northern rock.
^^^ nail, hit, head :D
People in Scotland pay tax at the same rates as we do in England. But they get more of it per head back in funding than we do (ie, they get some of our tax money as well as their own). This is called subsidy. I'm not saying this is or isn't right, but please don't deny it is happening. And BTW, local (ie, council) tax does not fund universities - national taxes do. Council tax pays for schools (primary/secodary)
I know that (we are going seriously OT here) Scottish Univeristies are funded by the Scottish Government, who may or may not be subsidised by westminister, but im not going to get dragged into a north/south divide debate.. its too early and i need to goto work :p
@6625 - you seem to forget the years and years where the Scots voted out of Scotland your blood sucking Thatcher/Major governments and the years and years when billions were ploughed into your overheated South East English economy like widening the M25 (again) and that daft war in the Falklands and the years and years Westminster stole our oil revenues. Now it's payback time so stop your moaning.
The Scottish scheme looks to be a good idea and there are Notspots remaining to address in England too.
One wonders what we got for the last lot of RDA spend in this area - £5.8m in the EEDA region for example.