Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what estimate his Department has made of when average download speeds in the whole of Blaydon constituency will reach 14.7 mbps.

This question was answered on 16th March 2015

House of Commons Library analysis (http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN06643.pdf) of Ofcom postcode data related to June 2014 suggested the average download speed across the Blaydon constituency was then about 18.7 Mbit/s.

The Government's Broadband programme is helping to increase availability of superfast broadband by over 40,000 premises in the Borough of Blaydon to 96%, which could led to further increase in average speeds.