The UK government has announced to provide an amount of £440m to authorities to connect 600,000 more premises (businesses and homes) with superfast broadband in remote locations.
According to government, the cash being provided includes £150 million from “efficiency savings” and the rest being the money returned subsidies from BT that were allocated by the government under broadband rollout scheme.
In 2010, the government had signed a deal with BT and paid it money to connect hard-to-reach areas with superfast broadband. These were the areas where telecom companies refrained from installing broadband infrastructure because it was not cost-effective for them. Under this agreement, BT had to repay some of the subsidy, if more than 20% of premises in those areas bought superfast broadband.
According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the take-up has been on average 30.6%, and therefore BT returned about £292m to the government.
While the government and BT consider the Broadband Delivery UK project and a public/private partnership a big success, the critics consider it an overbearing monopoly, providing huge sums of public money with little democratic accountability and getting only a semi-fast network.
Many experts however believe the program is doing fine, and the UK is now ahead of most other European countries in superfast broadband race.
“The key point is this is not £440m of new money,” said Andrew Ferguson, consumer telecoms expert at Think Broadband. He however thinks it is “good news” that more money is being provided for infrastructure development.
“The pace of broadband rollout doesn’t necessarily match what everyone wants and households aren’t necessarily getting as much information as they would like,” he added.
