By Nick Turner

Last updated at 08:11, Friday, 30 November 2012

A £51 million contract to bring superfast broadband to 93 per cent of Cumbrian homes and businesses has finally been signed.

Bill Murphy, of Next Generation Access BT, with Liz Mallinson, of Cumbria County Council, overseen by Penrith and the Border MP Rory Stewart

Cumbria County Council and BT signed the deal on the shores of Ullswater, signalling the start of a communications revolution in the county that it is hoped will transform the fortunes of many rural communities.

Penrith and the Border MP Rory Stewart hailed it as a great day for Cumbria that marked the end of two years of delays and negotiations that seemed to have involved a “different crisis every month”.

Superfast broadband would allow schools in remote valleys to provide language teaching, Parkinson’s sufferers to speak to doctors online rather than drive to Newcastle and help Cumbria’s self employed and home workers compete in the global market, he said.

Mr Stewart said: “Cumbria has been held back for hundreds of years by the challenges of distance and communication.

“Here in Glenridding we are in the middle of one of the sparsely populated districts in the most sparsely populated constituency in England,” he added, warning that there was a still a lot of work for communities to do if Cumbria was to meet its ambition of having the best rural broadband in Europe by 2015.

“Businesses and communities need to play their part in going that last mile and we have flexible funds standing by to help.”

BT will now embark on a two-year roll-out that will deliver speeds of up to 80Mbps for Cumbrian homes once the county council’s cabinet has met in January to agree a set of priorities which will determine the order in which communities get connected.

It will approve a plan that will show each community and business at which point in the two-year programme will be connected and what speeds to expect.

Those that require higher speeds will be given advice and support.

Fibre to the home technology – delivering ultra-fast speeds of up to 330Mbps – will also be deployed in certain areas and will be available on demand.

Those premises in the remaining seven per cent who currently have very poor internet speeds will also see an uplift because the project aims to deliver a minimum of 2Mbps or more to almost all homes and businesses.

Liz Mallinson, the county councillor responsible for leading the Connecting Cumbria broadband initiative, emphasised that money would  have to be spent in rural areas.

Bill Murphy, managing director of BT’s Next Generation Access, said: “The statistics show that in Cumbria something like 7,000 businesses operate from villages, hamlets and isolated properties, which is why BT is committed to helping push fibre to those hardest to reach, offering a helping hand to the small community projects where residents are helping to build their own superfast connections.”

First published at 08:07, Friday, 30 November 2012
Published by http://www.cumberlandnews.co.uk