The UK coalition government has revealed some new bits of information about its recently announced "superfast" Next Generation Access (NGA) broadband pilots in the Highlands and Islands (Scotland), Cumbria, North Yorkshire and the Golden Valley, Herefordshire (England). The projects were officially revealed on Wednesday as part of the Chancellor's Spending Review.

The pilot exercise aims to help establish the commercial costs and challenges involved in rolling out superfast broadband across the UK. It's now understood that each pilot area will receive between £5m and £10m in funding from the £530m being set aside.


It's understood that some of the pilots could take up to 18 months before the deployment phase. In addition many of the areas, not least North Yorkshire (NYnet) and the Scottish Highlands/Islands (Pathfinder North Project), have already had millions spent upon them. However in most cases this involved broadband projects to connect local authorities (council, schools, police etc.) and businesses, not residents.

The money itself is a tiny amount for such sizable locations, although with innovative use and the right regulatory environment it could go a lot further than you might think. Smaller ISPs have already shown that they can deliver superfast broadband for considerably less than the largest operators, such as BT Group, and the real test could be in whether or not the government recognises this.

UPDATE 25th October 2010

We missed this last week but Point Topic also had some further details to add.