Risk of South West 'turning into a broadband backwater'

Rural parts of the West Country will become broadband backwaters unless Government intervention extends Next Generation Access to all parts of the UK.

A report by the South West Regional Development Agency earlier this year found that about 20 per cent of the South West does not have access to the minimum recommended speed of 2Mb.

This compares with around 11 per cent of the rest of the country.

Annette Murphy, business development and sales director at fibre provider Geo, which owns optical fibre networks across the UK, said that Government intervention was vital to prevent the formation of a two-tier broadband society.

Ms Murphy spoke at the Next Gen Roadshow broadband event, in Bridgwater, Somerset, earlier this week.

She warned that the region was at risk of people and businesses migrating towards better broadband provision.

She said: "There are significant implications for areas like the South West where tourism is a major industry, because people will require the same sorts of services that they have at home. There are huge consequences."

Councillor William Mumford, Devon County Council's cabinet member for economic regeneration, said the council had highlighted four particular areas of concern in the county which had the greatest economic potential but the worst broadband connectivity.

These are the area around Ilfracombe, the area to the east of Exeter, around Totnes and near Tavistock.

"There is a very real risk that rural Devon will have a disparity in terms of connectivity," he said.

The coalition Government announced last week that it was appointing Ed Vaizey as the new Broadband Minister.

His appointment has been welcomed by the Federation of Small Business, which said high speed, reliable broadband was crucial to the future of small businesses.

The FSB urged the Government to make basic broadband speeds a universal service obligation to help small businesses.

In a report called "Broadband: Steps for an Incoming Government", the FSB says that small businesses are not trading online as efficiently as they could because of a lack of fast and reliable broadband.

FSB research shows that nearly a third of small firms were offered between two and four MBs but 94 per cent said they felt their service providers' offerings were failing to meet their advertised claims. It called for part of the licence fee to be used to fund a country-wide broadband roll out.