Chancellor George Osborne used his budget speech today to announce an additional £50m for ‘ultrafast’ broadband in cities in the UK.
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport also named the ten cities which will receive funding from the £100million pot announced last year. ‘Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds & Bradford, Newcastle and Manchester along with the four UK capital cities have all successfully bid to become Super-Connected Cities with ultrafast fixed broadband access, and large areas of public wireless connectivity,’ it said.
The DCMS defines ‘ultra-fast’ as broadband which has ‘a minimum download speed of at least 80Mbps.’ That means that the connection must be rated at 80Mbps or higher, not that it must actually operate with a minimum transfer rate of 80Mbps.
As MacUser’s sister site, PC Pro explains, the £100m figure is the total size of the fund and will only be spent if every city is allocated the maximum possible amount.
The additional £50m will be used to provide ‘ultrafast’ broadband in more cities.
The Chancellor also announced that additional Government funding meant that mobile phone coverage would extend to 60,000 more homes and businesses and coverage on major roads would be extended.
