Lancashire County Council have announced that they are putting together plans to roll out Super Fast Broadband to almost every place in Lancashire by 2014 to attract new businesses and benefit domestic customers. A partner will be selected by competitive tender to implement the work and a number of funding sources identified. The council is expected to pass the plans on the 3rd February.
Trials are underway by BT for a national scheme on a much slower timeframe. Super Fast Broadband is often defined as up to 100MB and uses fibre optic cable either up to the cable cabinet on the end of your road or to your house. The Lancashire scheme is said to include a variety of technologies appropriate for the areas to be covered.
This sounds a great scheme, not sure how much it will cost users though, and might guess it will be expensive, say £50 a month, for a domestic user. BT are polling areas on their website and only those places with enough registered potential users are likely to get early roll out.
The LCC website says: ‘Lancashire has a population of 1.16m, 468,868 homes and 40,100 VAT/PAYE registered enterprises.’ That will exclude Blackpool, Blackburn and other unitary councils.
Read Lancashire County Councils plan on their website:
http://www3.lancashire.gov.uk/corporate/news/press_releases/y/m/release.asp?id=201101&r=PR11/0043