Colton Superfast Broadband Why it's important and how we can get it......Mike Postle (mike@mpo1.uk)

Another Enquiry !

 
 
 
MPs have launched another enquiry into rural broadband speeds following concerns that the current expenditure being made to bring superfast broadband to rural areas will leave significant gaps.

 

This time it’s the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee which has been prompted to look at the issue by the news that as from this coming January, all applications for the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) schemes will have to be made on line. We’ve already noted that there will be an increasing assumption when designing systems that there will be universal access to superfast broadband (and importantly reliable broadband) and here’s a case in point.

 

Farms in the Parish, of course by their fact that they are often isolated properties, are more likely to have problems in accessing reliable and fast broadband services.

 

With the help of a sample of farms in the Parish, the (usual) very tight deadline for submissions to the Committee has been beaten and, through the Parish Council, the committee now has our local input to take into account. 

 

None of you will be surprised that most farms currently have an issue with both the speed and the reliability of their broadband connections – with one having an outage of several weeks. Increasingly this is having an adverse economic effect and leads to inefficiencies. Those of you who have followed this blog will not be surprised to learn that so far we can not say for sure what the impact of the Connecting Cumbria  project (or its planned successors) will be on individual farms.

 

Our recommendations are hardly rocket science. They include:

·         setting up a mechanism to monitor and evaluate the outcomes of the current DCMS projects (eg Connecting Cumbria) on farm connectivity;

·         the use the information to work with the roll-out of what’s now known as phase 2 so that public monies both from DCMS and from DEFRA can be spent effectively – dealing with the remaining not-spots and making sure that isolated farms are not left out.

 

It will mean two Whitehall departments working together – too much to hope for?