A recent House of Lords report stated that the Government’s broadband funding scheme was simply made to order haute couture for none other than BT, do forgive the high fashion pun.
As a quick reminder, BDUK has set aside £530m to deploy superfast broadband (25Mbps or above) to 90 per cent within every county with the remaining 10 per cent to be left with basic broadband (at least 2Mbps).
It has been stated that because of the regulations that the BDUK had put in place, it was only realistic for major companies to win funds in order to deploy broadband.
An extract from the report is as follows:
“As a local authority area may not contain sufficient diversity for this sort of sustainable cross-subsidy itself, an infrastructure provider unable to draw on national scale is likely to be unable to compete.”
Because BT has always been a huge player in the broadband market, some industry insiders argued that they were not surprised to see other companies shying away from placing a bid as they thought that competing with the giant was pointless. This left only BT and Fujitsu as the only remaining major bidders.
Meanwhile, Europe is still thinking whether or not it was willing to give the BDUK scheme the green light, as the monopolist situation concerned the EC.
It’s worth saying that further delays are eminent. This does not affect North Yorkshire which independently received state aid clearance.
A fiasco. Where are the procurement and state aid lawyers who advised BDUK that a blanket notification could work? I’m guessing there weren’t any… QED