The Lancashire County Council (LCC) and Lancashire Enterprise Partnership (LEP), which earlier this year announced plans to deploy a new superfast broadband ISP network in the county by 2014 (here), has revealed that it plans to spend a total of £60m on the deployment.

According to the council, £13m should ideally come from the UK government's current Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office budget of £530m. Meanwhile a further £16.5m is hoped to be found via the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). The rest would surface through match-funding from the Private Sector (e.g. BT Group).

Ofcom's current UK Fixed Broadband Map 2011 claims that the North West England county of Lancashire, which is home to around 1.5 Million people, receives average sync speeds of 7.4Mbps and that 14.8% suffer speeds of less than 2Mbps. Superfast broadband is allegedly already available to 39% of the region and more will follow via BT's FTTC service by March 2012.


The UK government currently aims for 90% of "people in each local authority area" to be within reach of a superfast broadband (25Mbps+) ISP service by 2015, while the last 10% can expected a minimum speed of at least 2Mbps. Some 16 local MPs have already given their support to the initiative.

BDUK is due to announce its next round of funding, which could potentially cover all of the remaining money, by the end of this month. Meanwhile the ERDF isn't expected to reveal whether or not LCC has won its bid for EU cash until later in the year.