Government Appoints New BDUK Chief And Details £10m Rural Broadband Trial

The government has appointed London Olympics bigwig Chris Townsend to run the body charged with increasing broadband speeds in rural parts of Britain, and revealed more details of a £10 million trial of alternative technologies to make superfast network connections more widely available.

As the new chief executive of Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), Townsend will assume control of the £10 million trial, along with the rest of the project which has so far delivered contracts for BT to supply faster broadband in several counties. He was commercial director of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and has previously held marketing positions at Transport for London (TfL) and BskyB.

Delivering broadband to remote parts is a challenge because of the expense of installing fibre. First announced in December, the new trial will test technologies and methods such as 4G, satellite and extending fibre from the cabinet to further down the network, to test their suitability to ensure that 98 percent of the UK population can receive superfast broadband by 2018.

Mobile broadband trial

Suppliers are being invited to submit proposals for the trial, which will open on 17 March, and the technology tested could eventually be used as part of a £250 million scheme to expand superfast broadband coverage to areas not covered by the existing  £530 million BDUK initiative.

BDUK is aiming for 90 percent coverage by 2015, but has been subject to a number of criticisms, not least that all the available money under the initiative has been allocated to BT and that it has been focussed exclusively on fixed line connections.

The government is keen to get mobile operators on board for the next stage of the rollout, with 4G long being touted as a way of solving so-called rural “not-spots”, but culture secretary Maria Miller insists that current progress is “exceeding expectations” and that the UK is on track for 95 percent coverage by 2017.

Exceedingly good rollout

“Our nationwide rollout of superfast broadband will benefit everyone from school children to business owners, parents to patients,” she says. “An estimated 10,000 homes and businesses are gaining access to superfast speeds every week but now we need to focus on the hardest to reach communities.

“If we want to ensure that that all communities can benefit then we need to think imaginatively about alternative technology, and the pilots enabled by the £10m fund will be instrumental in helping us overcome the challenges of reaching the final five percent of premises.”

Vodafone has been among those to voice their support, while EE has called for more government support for the rollout of 4G. It recently extended its LTE network to rural Cumbria, claiming to have brought superfast broadband to the region at a fraction of the cost of a comparable fibre rollout.

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