Hampshire and Southampton to Obtain High Speed Broadband

With the bidding of the Council receiving the acceptance of the government, Hampshire and Southampton are getting set to receive super-fast broadband facilities that will be provided in the course of the coming three years.

It has been planned that 90% of the households and business firms would avail accessibility to high speed broadband facilities whereas a minimum of 2Mbps download speeds would be made available in all places. The ministers have assigned fund assigned to this end.

The councils of all counties were given an opportunity to bid for the money, however if they were to qualify for the grant they had to complete and submit a “Local Broadband Plan” that had to be approved.

The county council was awarded a five million pounds fund that had been put aside for the areas that also included Southampton, the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth. This was a share from the kitty of 8.4 million pounds to provide super-fast services across the UK. The amount of 5 million pounds from the Broadband delivery UK had to be matched by both council and private investments.

Currently there are approximately 5,000 residential homes and 7,000 business firms throughout Hampshire are in areas where they are cannot access broadband or that have extremely slow speeds of 2Mbs or lower.

Their business partner would be decided only by December 2012 and the provider accepting the contract would have three years to implement and complete the venture i.e. by the year 2015.