The Government will plough £830 million into reaching its goal of having the best broadband in Europe by 2015.

The new plan is to create fibre-based "digital hubs" in communities, and then link residences to the hubs with fast connections, by the end of this parliament.

Of the £830 million in funding revealed by Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt, £500 million was previously annouced during the spending review. The rest will come from the BBC license fee over the next seven years. Local authorities will be required to bid for grants to install the hubs and connections.

Hunt will also reveal that £50 million of those funds will go towards trialling new ways to roll out broadband.

The previous Government had promised a minimum 2Mbits/sec across the UK by 2012, but that has since been pushed back to 2015. Hunt now says that goal has been rolled into the new project.

However, the Government doesn't clearly define what minimum speed will be required to have the "best" broadband.

"In order to determine what constitutes 'the best' network in Europe, we will adopt a scorecard which will focus on four headline indicators: speed, coverage, price and choice," the strategy says, according to a report in the Guardian. "These will be made up of a number of composite measures rather than a single factor such as headline download speed."

BT has said it will contribute extra funding if it wins any Government money for rolling out fibre. “BT’s fantastic range of measures could, on top of the Government’s £830 million investment, bring superfast broadband to around 90% of the population," Hunt said.

Rural Affairs Secretary Caroline Spelman said that getting fast broadband connections to rural areas was "probably the single most important thing we can do to ensure the sustainability of our rural communities in the 21st century".


Read more: Government coughs up £830 million for broadband | Broadband | News | PC Pro http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/3 ... z17L28c9Dq

The next time the ISPs start whinging about iPlayer, the Beeb should bring up this funding. Before or after calling them opportunistic, lying scum and telling them to fcuk off, whatever works

Wonderful, moveable goalposts.

Doesn't matter, we 're sh!t in all of those.

Jon

Did PC Pro really just publish "license fee"? Do they mean "licence fee" per chance?

While investment in the broadband infrastructure is a good thing I can' help feeling that an awful lot of it will somehow be ending up in the pockets of BT executives and shareholders rather than as cables in the ground.

That is my concern. What about the sticks to hit BT with if this is not achieved?

Why stop with sticks, this is BT we're talking about

Personally I would like to see the local loop nationalised if BT fail to make the investment necessary. Then there will be much better competition as no one provider will have any such advantage.