UK.gov claims 'success' over SME broadband scheme The government has admitted to falling substantially short of its original target to hand small businesses £100m in broadband vouchers. The Broadband Connection scheme was launched at the end of 2013 to provide grants for faster web access of up to £3,000, but the Department for Culture, Media and Sport confirmed today that …
They need not have advertised it at all, the leased line companies were pushing it without their help. Put simply it's not enough to cover upwards of 12k install costs where I got a quote for and for some reason the telcos think they can fleece you more for the photons to go a bit further than they normally do out into the rurals. Who is really going to sign up for 1k a month for a 10/100 for 3 years?
There's nothing to spend it on. By giving BT the BDUK money, maintaining their monopoly, anything that isn't FTTC remains esoteric or too expensive. None of the Kent County Council ISPs could offer me FTTP when I called them up and asked them. FTTP is the only solution with a future, and far too expensive or just not available.
The fact that Ed Vaisey calls this voucher campaign a success underpins why people are disillusioned by politics in general. Utter nonsense, tantamount to lipstick on the pig that is BDUK support of FTTC as our future.
But it worked ok for us..
I was looking to order a 1Gb leased line from Virgin, as a very good supplier told us about it, we did get given £3,000 toward the installation cost, which was a great help in convincing the bean-counters to approve the budget!
Though truth be told - never order a leased line from Virgin, it took 7 months to get it installed.. Ordered in June last year, had 5 different "survey" visits to the site. Which was ridiculous, cause in the end they discovered they already had a 24 core connection coming into the building and simply connected us to that!
As an SME your barrier to a fast Internet line is rarely the install costs. If you can't afford the £3000 for installation then you're unlikely to be able to afford the £500 per month to run the line. Most businesses can get FTTC, if they need more than that then chances are they can afford to fund it themselves.
As far as I recall, the scheme is also only available to connect your principal place of business - which is the place that's most likely to be connected already. Secondary sites and, in particular, home-based employees don't seem to be eligible.
I suspect the people who signed up as "broadband delivery partners" are going to be feeling very sore - the government got organisations to tender to support businesses in broadband takeup and set very aggressive conversion targets in return for funding their "engagement" plans: I imagine many of those targets have been missed leaving the bidding organisations seriously out of pocket.
This top bit is not true - so long as your company passes the company eligibility test and the location you want to claim for is in an area that supports the scheme, you should be able to claim for that site.
I think home workers are only supported if their home is an official office of the company and their permanent working location, although sole traders who work from home can also be eligible.
For may small businesses, especially where the £3k won't cover the initial install. Ongoing monthly costs compared to a "fiber' connection are crazy, especially when the business only needs high bandwidth part of the time (e.g. downloads, uploading large files to clients).
All these crazy schemes need to be scraped and put towards a future-proofed fiber to the X network.
We received a number of ethically questionable offers to use this as an inducement to switch providers (we are already connected). For our remote locations, if it wasn't in an area already covered by decent provision and just requiring a hook up, then either the offering entity was not interested, seeking an "easy job" with the chance to raise the price by most of the cost of the subsidy, or the overall cost was still too high.
I suspect a large amount of this money has ended up padding the accounts of providers of snake oil.
Considering the Web Dev team (I.e. All two of us) actually care about having a half decent net connection the md wasn't too keen on spending more per month than it costs for our current connection all year.
Agree about them avoiding upgrading the cabinets near business areas to stiff them with higher cost lines.
Now here's a mad idea, what if the government let businesses pool the vouchers to get local cabinets upgraded? Or is that just too sensible?
>Now here's a mad idea, what if the government let businesses pool the vouchers to get local cabinets upgraded?
You can pool vouchers, however the onus is on you to:
1. Identify a cabinet that isn't going to be upgrade.
2. Discover the cost that BT has set on that cabinet's upgrade.
3. Determine if it is within an area that qualifies for the SME scheme.
3. Persuade your local BDUK delivery agent (typically a quango) to identify what funds they have available and can allocate (or would of allocated if BT had determined the cabinet was economic to upgrade) and put such funds into your pot.
4. Identify the SME business users of said cabinet.
5. Knock on doors and convince these businesses they should upgrade to Fibre and hence apply for a voucher etc..
6. Present your case, using all avenues available to you, including councillors, MP etc. and hope BT will accept it.
Finally don't expect to be paid for doing the above, because that was the local delivery quango should of been doing all along but were too lazy to do...
A slightly less involved way that we have done with some business parks is to get a number of local businesses together to split a leased line and distribute it locally.
Once you have 3 or 4 businesses interested the costs soon become much more affordable as you get to under £100pm rental and you can pool vouchers, so even with costly excess construction charges you usually have it covered, and the vouchers can pay for the cabling and point to point equipment.
We've turned round a couple like this in a couple of months, which is prob quick compared with trying to get a cabinet upgraded.
...to threaten BT with legal action if they didn't enable ALL exchanges for FTTC.
I live within spitting distance of a major exchange (ESROS), but can't get faster than ADSL speeds.
Most small companies can't afford £500 a month for their Internet access. And many ISPs waive the installation costs if you sign up for 3 years anyway, so the scheme is pointless.
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