BT eyeing Staffordshire broadband funding

Wednesday, August 31st 2011
The telecoms giant is aiming to secure some of the £7.44 million of broadband funding awarded to Staffordshire.
BT eyeing Staffordshire broadband funding
BT's regional director for the West Midlands has argued the case for the telecoms giant being awarded public money to improve broadband connectivity in Staffordshire.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has awarded £7.44 million to the county, with the money set to be spent on bringing fast internet access to more than 178,000 properties in the area.

In a letter published by the Burton Mail, John Dovey from BT declared the announcement of government funding for Staffordshire is good news for local homes and businesses that would not otherwise have benefited from broadband improvement work.

He noted that while the company is currently engaged in a £2.5 billion project to bring fibre optic broadband to two-thirds of properties across the UK, it is also keen to collaborate with the public sector to help boost connectivity for the so-called 'final third'. This comprises largely rural, less densely populated locations where the costs and challenges related to rolling out broadband are significantly higher.

According to Mr Dovey, BT is "well placed" to play an important role in developing Staffordshire's communications infrastructure thanks to experience in deploying sustainable, open-access networks across the county in the past.

"This experience and our proven partnership approach, which is already bringing super-fast broadband to rural areas such as Cornwall and Northern Ireland, are important factors if we are all to benefit from competition and the resulting low prices," he explained.

The regional director added he and his colleagues are looking forward to "developing proposals to support the county vision for faster broadband services to our rural areas".

Earlier this year, BT announced another 143,000 homes and businesses in the West Midlands will be hooked up to its fibre optic broadband network either before the end of this year or during 2012. Some 63,000 of these properties will be located in Staffordshire.

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02nd October 2009
Sky's press writers have an excellent grasp of diplomatic language. Allow me to translate: "The only way to prevent piracy is for information distributors (ISPs) to collude with information-restriction advocates (recording industry) and demand that the government curtail individual rights in order to allow the information-restriction people to maintain the illusion that they are "creating" (copying) a valuable product." Making the industry happy would require that thousands of sites be directly blocked by every ISP in the country. But that wouldn't stop piracy. You would have to block everyone who has ever intentionally pirated domestically, and block every otherwise allowed site that proxies traffic to banned sites. To be effective, that would require outright bans on every foreign network, whitelisting only authorized sites. (This is the state of the "Great Firewall of China") And it STILL wouldn't stop piracy - think email, IM, IRC... So, now you have to ban any non-authorized communication, and we've reduced the internet to cable television. And it STILL won't stop piracy because people still have the ability to directly connect to their friends and neighbours. Preventing piracy is a form of censorship. The internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it. If you want to kill piracy, you will have to kill the internet at the most basic level - destroy the ability for two individuals to communicate without explicit authorization. Anything less, and you're wasting your time.
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