Peterborough and Cambridgeshire get £500,000 to help boost broadband speeds

Residents and businesses in rural areas of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough are being urged to apply for government funding to benefit from the fastest and most reliable fibre connectivity - before the money runs out.

Connecting Cambridgeshire has secured £500,000 extra “top-up” funding from the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority to help premises with the slowest broadband cover the cost of installing new gigabit-capable connections that will more than double their speeds.

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough voucher top-up funding is part of Connecting Cambridgeshire’s Keeping Everyone Connected work, using digital connectivity to help businesses and communities to recover from Covid-19, and will be used to rollout fibre broadband to the hardest-to-reach areas.

Gigabit-capable means 1,000 megabits per second (1,000Mbps). Future-ready full fibre connections are faster, more reliable and cheaper to operate than traditional copper lines and provide a big leap forward in terms of speeds and reliability. Residents can choose to upgrade to 1,000Mbps or sign up to lower speed packages that match their requirements.

Groups of rural premises with broadband speeds of less than 100Mbps, can apply to the national Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme and pool vouchers worth up to £1,500 for homes and £3,500 for small to medium enterprises (SMEs) towards the cost of installing a new full fibre connection.

In addition, eligible rural properties getting less than 30Mbps will automatically receive a ‘top up’ to the voucher - offering an extra £1,500 per household or business towards the installation cost of gigabit-capable broadband. This means premises in group projects with the slowest speeds will get vouchers worth up to £3,000 per residential premise and up to £5,000 per business.

Group projects are when two or more residents or businesses get together to combine their vouchers towards the cost of connections. They will then be able to choose an internet package from a provider to suit their needs and budget.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important it is for everyone to have access to reliable, fast broadband. Being digitally connected is vital for staying in touch with friends and loved ones and is key to being able to work from home, while also helping to stabilise local businesses.

Mayor of Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, James Palmer, said: “Businesses have had to adapt rapidly to working in very different ways with increasing reliance on digital technology, so all our residents need fast, reliable connectivity – wherever they are.

“Groups of rural premises – residents and businesses - are being urged to apply for Gigabit Broadband Vouchers. With our additional funding these can be worth up to £5,000 for businesses and £3,000 for households, to support the cost of installing new gigabit-capable connections that more than double broadband speeds.”

The deadline to apply for the scheme is March 31, 2021 unless funding runs out before then as money will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

A quarter of a million rural homes and businesses across England have been given access to more financial help to get top-of-the-range broadband speeds.

More than £22 million of additional funding is being invested into the UK Government’s broadband voucher scheme, which subsidises the costs of building gigabit-capable broadband networks to hard-to-reach areas.

Gigabit-capable broadband enables internet download speeds of up to 1,000 megabits per second (mbps) - enough to download a HD movie in less than 30 seconds and lay the foundations for 8K-quality video streaming and virtual reality online gaming.

This new frontier in digital connectivity has the potential to revolutionise rural communities and make them more attractive places to live.

It will give people who depend on reliable connections to work from home and keep in touch with family due to coronavirus, the freedom to live and work more flexibly and will help develop thriving digital economies.

Digital Infrastructure Minister Matt Warman is now urging businesses and communities to apply for the vouchers to future-proof their internet connections and be ready to reap the economic and social benefits brought by new advances in technology.

Matt Warman, Minister for Digital Infrastructure, said: “This government is determined to connect every home and business to the fastest broadband speeds available from the Highlands to the Jurassic Coast.

“But we can only do this with collaboration at a local and national level so I’m delighted English councils have committed to pump more money into our voucher scheme to help rural communities get gigabit speed broadband.

“A quarter of all properties across the UK can now access these fast and reliable speeds, and we have earmarked a further £5 billion so rural towns and villages across the four nations can get the speeds they need to seize all the benefits of new technology.”

The UK Government’s Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme targets areas where the cost of building new gigabit broadband infrastructure, which often requires digging trenches to lay full fibre cables to people’s doorsteps, is likely to be too high for commercial operators to cover alone.

Since May 2019, vouchers worth up to £3,500 for small and medium sized businesses and up to £1,500 for residential premises have been available to cover these costs in rural areas across the UK.

Seventeen local councils in England have also provided £22.2 million worth of funding to top-up the values of the vouchers in their areas. At least 250,000 homes and businesses in the English countryside are expected to be eligible for this funding.

Nearly 45,000 gigabit broadband vouchers, worth more than £90 million, have already been issued and there is more than £70 million worth of vouchers on offer immediately to take companies and residents in rural towns and villages out of the digital slow lane.

On top of this, the government has promised £5 billion to ensure hard-to-reach areas get access to gigabit connections over the next few years. Details on how this will be spent will be announced this autumn.

FACTFILE:

The Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme is a UK-wide, supplier-led scheme offering vouchers used as part of a group project, to pay towards the cost of installing gigabit-capable broadband to rural premises, i.e. homes and businesses, providing speeds of over 1,000 Mpbs or 1 Gbps. Beneficiaries do not have to take those speeds and pay only for what they want to use, knowing they can increase them over time. Anyone who is interested uses a postcode checker to find registered suppliers in their area. Their chosen supplier will guide them through the application. For more information and to check eligibility visit: https://gigabitvoucher.culture.gov.uk/