Posted: 18th Oct, 2011 By: MarkJ


The UK governments
Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has published a "
high level description of the delivery arrangements" under which the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) office, which aims to deploy superfast broadband internet access services around the country, will operate and thus achieve its objectives. This includes an updated timetable of progress and appears to suggest that BT could benefit from the
lion's share of state aid funding (widely expected).
BDUK's primary objective is to ensure that the UK "
has the best Superfast Broadband in Europe" by May 2015, which means beating Europe's own
Digital Agenda. The EU's agenda aims to ensure that all Europeans have access to "
basic" and "
competitively-priced" broadband internet access services by 2013 and superfast (30Mbps+) speeds by 2020 (with 50% of EU households subscribing to 100Mbps).
By contrast BDUK will use its initial
budget of £530m until May 2015 (rising to £830m by 2017 via the BBC TV Licence fee) to help 90% of "
people in each local authority area" gain access to a superfast (
24Mbps+) broadband ISP service by 2015. The last 10% will have to put up with minimum speeds of at least 2Mbps, which the model describes as "
Standard Broadband". The
delivery model visualises its plan as follows.
The delivery model also includes a slightly updated
timetable of the programme's
key milestones, which hints that a
new report is due to set out any "
lessons learned" from the current BDUK pilots and the government's approach to related investment in November 2011 next month.
Generally speaking the delivery model itself mostly rehashes much of what we've already been told over the past two years. Credits to
Ian Grant for spotting the documents publication, which quietly appeared on DCMS's page just over one week ago (internally issued on 13th May 2011).
BDUK Delivery Model 2011 (v1.01)
http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/BDUK-Programme-Delivery-Model-vs1-01.pdf