Asked by: Jamie Reed (Labour - Copeland)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the Answer of 17 July 2014 to Question 205697, what proportion of premises in each county now have access to superfast broadband.
Answered by Lord Vaizey of Didcot
The information on the proportion of premises able to access superfast broadband at unitary authority level is published annually by Ofcom in a map. This is publically available at: http://maps.ofcom.org.uk/broadband/
Ofcom also provide a table of information on broadband speed at: http://d2a9983j4okwzn.cloudfront.net/downloads/ofcom-uk-broadband-speed-data-2013.csv for Spring 2013. Revised figures for Spring 2014 will be published later this year.
Asked by: Jamie Reed (Labour - Copeland)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, pursuant to the Answer of 17 July 2014 to Question 205697, when he expects 100 per cent of properties in Copeland constituency to have access to superfast broadband.
Answered by Lord Vaizey of Didcot
The Government’s current target is for 95% superfast broadband coverage by 2017. There is no target date for 100% superfast coverage at present. However, the Government has recently funded eight projects through the £10 million pilot scheme to explore solutions to provide near universal superfast coverage.
Asked by: Jamie Reed (Labour - Copeland)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what progress his Department has made in upgrading fibre-optic broadband infrastructure in (a) Copeland and (b) other rural areas.
Answered by Lord Vaizey of Didcot
The Cumbria project will deliver Superfast broadband to nearly 110,000 premises in Cumbria by March 2015. The local broadband project team provide information about the roll-out timetable, including a post code checker on the local authority web site, which can be found at http://www.connectingcumbria.org.uk/when-and-where. With respect to the Copeland area, the local project team report that, combined with the BT Commercial roll out, it has already delivered superfast broadband to 10,500 premises to date. By June 2015, the fibre broadband roll-out will be completed and in Copeland over 90% of premises will have access to superfast broadband. To date the Connecting Cumbria project has delivered superfast broadband to nearly 40,000 and the national programme has delivered to over 600,000 premises and that number will rise to 1 million by the end of summer.