Posted: 30th Dec, 2010 By: MarkJ

The
Lincolnshire County Council (LCC) has confirmed plans to bid for a slice of the
£530m that has been set aside by the UK governments Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office. BDUK has been set the task of helping to deploy "
super-fast" broadband services throughout most of the country by
2015 (available cash could rise to
£830 by 2017) and will focus on mostly rural locations, where private sector investment will not go.
Lincolnshire (Lincs) is one of England's most rural county's and suffers from a large number of broadband "
Not-Spots", where no or very poor internet connectivity is available. However it's also home to Timico UK, a major business ISP.
Several smaller ISP projects, such as
Rutland Telecom's work to hook up the village of
Essendine with faster 40Mbps connectivity (
here) and
Fibrestream's efforts to bring a full 100Mbps fibre optic ( FTTH ) service to
Ashby de la Launde (
here), are sadly all too rare examples of progress.
Justin Brown, the Council Head of Economic Regeneration, told This is Lincolnshire:"First-class broadband is very important for Lincolnshire as it will help businesses to grow, local people access services and young people download learning materials.
Our strategy for improving digital coverage in Lincolnshire includes public sector organisations taking action, but the main aspects of our strategy are to persuade private digital service providers, such as BT, Virgin, Vodafone and the wealth of others, that they should invest in Lincolnshire and that it would be worth their while doing so."
It's understood that the council plans to bid, like others, for tax-payers cash during
spring 2011. In the meantime they have a somewhat sparse website called
Onlincolnshire, which aims to provide local residents and businesses with useful information regarding the state of the digital landscape across the County.