£1m Grant to Help 3700 Extra Hampshire Premises to Get Fibre Broadband

The Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has awarded a grant worth £1 million to help make superfast broadband services available to an additional 1,700 homes and businesses in the New Forest and over 2,000 in the Test Valley (Hampshire, England).

The extra investment, which has the smell of a former Rural Community Broadband Fund (RCBF) project, appears to be on top of the Hampshire Superfast Broadband Programme‘s existing deployment that is currently focusing upon many of the same areas as part of its phase two roll-out with BT.

The difference is that this new investment will help the scheme to push further out and into a number of even more remote rural areas, which might previously have been bypassed due to falling outside of the projects current target for making “superfast” broadband speeds of 25Mbps+ available to “at least” 90% of local premises by the end of 2015 and then 95% by 2017.

Peter Heywood-Broomfield, Chairman of the New Forest Community Broadband Group, said:

“The successful bid will make a huge difference to those selected rural parishes, which are too small to be commercially attractive and in danger of being left in a communications desert.”

According to the local Daily Echo, work to make use of the extra funding will occur within the existing time-frame between June and December 2015.