Two neighbouring counties in South West England (UK), Devon County Council (DCC) and Somerset County Council (SCC), have teamed up in order to make a joint bid for funds from the Government's new Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office. The money, which is to be taken from BDUK's budget of £530m until 2015 (rising to £830m by 2017), will be used to help deploy superfast broadband internet access services across both counties.

According to the plan, both county's want to see broadband services deployed that can deliver ISP download speeds exceeding "20MB/s to 85% of businesses and homes, with a minimum of 2MB/s to all premises by 2015". That's obviously a typo because MB/s are MegaBytes, where as what they meant to say was Mb/s for MegaBits (only eight times difference :tongue:). Hopefully the government knows what they mean otherwise their bid could run into a wall.

The ultimate goal is superfast broadband for everyone, as far as possible, or so they say. This would be a substantial improvement on the situation now where nearly a quarter of homes and businesses in Somerset and Devon (300,000) currently have no or very slow broadband.

In Devon 22% of businesses said that slow broadband acted as a constraint on growth and productivity, with 75% claiming that improved speeds would assist their business. In Somerset poor broadband is a barrier for 22% of rural businesses, compared to 5% of businesses in urban areas.



The two county's aim to submit their applications before the current 18th April 2011 deadline and a decision is expected to be made by the end of May. Meanwhile residents and businesses are being urged to complete a survey. The results will give greater insight into the issues faced by the community. The survey can be accessed online at http://www.connectingsomerset.co.uk, where more information on superfast broadband is also available.