When will rural areas get fast-speed fibre internet?

Some fibre is laid on overhead cables with a view Continue reading the main storyRelated StoriesRural broadband gets green lightBroadband providers launch appealRural areas 'should be priority' In the picturesque village of St Agnes in Cornwall, you can't get a mobile telephone signal unless you jump up and down in the middle of the road but you can get super-fast broadband, offering speeds of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second).

By June 2014, the majority of the county and the neighbouring Scilly Isles will be enjoying the same, thanks to a network being laid by BT, funded in part by the European Regional Development Fund.

What is much more unclear is whether that can be replicated around the rest of the country.

Developments in Cornwall are being keenly watched by BDUK - Broadband Delivery UK - the group set up to oversee rural broadband rollout in the UK.

It has allocated every council in the UK a pot of money to help them build similar fibre networks. Councils must choose someone to lay it and provide some cash to fund it.

So far only a handful of councils have chosen a supplier - and BT has won in every case, in most cases it has been the sole bidder.

BT's dominance may mean that the whole project - which requires state aid approval from the EU - could be considered anti-competitive.

Even if approval is given soon and each council begins rollouts, the Cornish example suggests that the government could still fall short of its target to have universal broadband by 2015.

BT began its Cornish deployment in 2010 and will not complete it until 2014.

"The later the start, the harder it will be to finish by a fixed end date," said Ranulf Scarborough, BT's director of Superfast Cornwall.

Wine club

Those living in areas with poor or non-existent broadband are getting fed up with waiting.

Continue reading the main storySUPERFAST CORNWALL By 2014, up to 90% of homes will have a fibre connection Cornwall is the EU's largest ever single investment in supefast broadband It is providing up to

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