Posted: 10th Jun, 2010 By: MarkJ

It's been just two days since the UK Secretary of State for
Culture, the Olympics Media and Sport (DCMS), Jeremy Hunt, set out the governments plan for bolstering the country's broadband internet access infrastructure (
here) and so far all of the reactions appear to have been broadly positive.
Outsourcery, which services 10,000 SME customers across the UK, believes that high-speed broadband access is critical especially for small businesses if Britain is to remain competitive in the global economy. It claims that the plan has been received well by the country’s business leaders.
Mark Seemann, Product Strategy and Development Director at Outsourcery, said:
"With more and more firms relying on technologies such as cloud computing to conduct a core part of their daily operations, high speed broadband is now absolutely mission-critical for Britain’s four million SME’s which make up some 97% of the private sector.
Without high speed broadband, the competitiveness of these businesses will be seriously harmed, as they become more and more dependent on communicating with core stakeholders, and accessing mission-critical data via the cloud."
The rural focused Country Land and Business Association (CLA) echoed Outsourcery to say it was "
greatly encouraged" by the three trial rural broadband projects announced by Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt and appeared generally supportive of the governments overall statement.
CLA President, William Worsley, said:
"We are greatly encouraged by the Ministers publicly committing themselves to a universal service commitment of two megabits a second by 2012 and by Mr Hunt's admission that it is a 'scandal' that nearly three million households in Britain cannot access this broadband speed and only one percent of the country has access to fibre optic-delivered broadband."
However the CLA added that rural businesses would still only survive and thrive if this Government wastes no time in putting its good intentions on rural broadband into practice. Network operator and ISP Entanet UK also hailed the plan as a "
promising start" before warning that "
only time [would] tell if [Jeremy Hunt] is really the right man for the job (along with Ed Vaizey of course)".
As it stands now we've had several weeks of promising talk and not an awful lot of practical action, although that is to expected coming so soon after the general election. Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) – the organisation which will be the delivery vehicle for these policies – will hold an industry event on 15th July to provide further details.