The Surrey County Council (SCC) in South East England (UK) has signed a three year contract with Research Machines, which is said to be worth £10.2 Million, for the delivery of faster broadband internet access services into 400 local schools.


The new service is expected to deliver download speeds of between 10Mbps and 50Mbps by September 2011. It will also form part of the councils wider efforts to make broadband available to 100% of Surrey by 2013.

UPDATE 12:39pm

ISPreview.co.uk has learnt that 14 local schools have chosen to opt-out of the project, which was originally supposed to have gone live in December 2010 when the old contract with Easynet came to an end. The service has since slipped to September 2011.

The seemingly over budget project, which is largely blamed upon "Excess Dig Costs" and continual running of the old Easynet contract, is part of the reason why the 14 schools have opted-out. Many of the small schools were able to get cheaper and more suitable services from alternative ISPs.

Unfortunately the schools that chose to opt-out have been left without access to a number of critical services, such as the lunch money online payments system. In addition, surrey council can now no longer exchange data with SIMS.NET (schools information management system).

Still, the money that such schools have been able to save by not going with the councils system has given them more flexibility to spend on new computers and other needs.