Osborne announces £50 million for rural broadband that isn't

FIASCO OR FAST MOVING, you decide, as the government has announced it is throwing £50 million at broadband that doesn't have to be rural before some trials out in the sticks have even got going.

George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer and former raucous Oxford Bullingdon club member, told the great unwashed of Bristol that bidding had been opened for £50 million of cash for broadband projects. The dosh is from BBC licence fee revenue that originally had been earmarked for the digital telly switchover.

This new cash outlay comes despite an October 2010 announcement that North Yorkshire, Cumbria, Herefordshire and the Highlands and Islands would get trials worth between £5 million and £10 million, depending on bids. Yet without any decisions having been taken on firms or technologies for those areas six months later, the latest tranche of cash has been thrown open to bids.

Bullingdon boy Osborne told Bristol, "Broadband is crucial for the country's economic future; that's why the coalition government is investing over half a billion pounds in its infrastructure. Today's £50 million will benefit up to 800,000 homes and businesses."

But probably not for some time, as the £40 million odd splurge announced in October is yet to reach anyone at all. That 2010 spending announcement and the new £50 million are both part of the four-year £530 million spend the coalition government announced last year for rural broadband. However the Treasury told The INQUIRER that, paradoxically, the £50 million doesn't have to go to rural areas that had been deemed uneconomic for private carriers' broadband buildout.

Beyond announcing things including this non-rural related wad for the broadband industry, what the government has done is create the Broadband Delivery UK Office within the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Local authorities wanting some or any of that cash will have to apply to the Broadband Delivery UK Office henceforth, which is known at The INQUIRER as the Broadband Non-Delivery UK Office. µ