Economic development in rural communities cannot happen without proper access to the Internet the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) warned recently. Currently 1/5 of people in rural areas do not have access to broadband which is adequate for business needs.
The CLA has criticised government plans to provide broadband coverage at speeds of at least 2MB per second to all areas of the UK by 2015 saying that progress has been too slow. The organisation has also predicted that the government will fail to meet their target date.
The CLA has historically campaigned for improved rural broadband provision, stating that all operators should be legally obliged to provide coverage to remote rural areas.
Minister for Culture, Media and Sport Ed Vaizey has said that the broadband programme is on track and he is confident that the government’s targets can be achieved.
Here at Freetimers we remain more than a little skeptical, particularly after the previous phase of rural broadband development, of which Freetimers was a participant with our DSB – Distributed Satellite Broadband – development (see ft-dsb.com), was basically undermined by government encouragment of BT to do just enough to undermine the rural broadband marketplace for other prospective providers.
Back To Blog