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I have spent quite a lot of time over the past few months trying to
ascertain how people throughout my constituency can access broadband. The
problems are not unique to us, however, but are commonplace throughout
rural areas. Extremely remote rural areas are affected, but so are areas
such as mine, which abuts Cambridge city.
The Cambridge science park is in the parish of Milton in my constituency,
not in the city of Cambridge. It is connected to the Cambridge exchange and
is able to access broadband. Absurdly, however, the rest of Milton parish
is connected to a different exchange and is not broadband enabled. Milton
is only one of the villages, I use the word advisedly, as we are talking
about settlements of several thousand people, so affected. Those villages
are full of small businesses, many of them at the leading edge of the
knowledge revolution and the knowledge-based economy, yet they are not able
to access broadband, and many have no prospect of being able to.
Like my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire, I shall not
be too critical of BT. It has made some progress in the past year, and has
reduced the threshold targets in some exchanges in my constituency, which I
welcome. It has introduced thresholds in a couple of exchanges that did not
previously have them, and that is a step in the right direction. It is also
considering the idea of aggregating different exchanges.
One problem is that many consumers do not know what their exchange is. Many
people confuse their exchanges with their STD codes. They do not understand
why some people who share their dialling code are able to access broadband
when they cannot.
As a result of the inability to access broadband via BT and the fact that
there is no prospect of that being possible, businesses and individuals
with specialist knowledge are trying to devise their own ways to access the
facility, using one of the various systems. In some cases, the villages in
my area are partly cabled. The work was done by the Cambridge Cable Co.,
now part of ntl. That makes the threshold problem harder. If part of a
village can access broadband via cable, it reduces the scope for other
providers to meet the threshold laid down by BT. However, cable facilities
are usually confined tightly to the centre of the villages, and it is
highly unlikely that they could be extended.
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