Broadband Cumbria

I think that the declaration is a good starter for ten, but the point of the campaign as I see it is to secure Next Generation Access Broadband.

In my view this means that everybody in a community needs to be able to stream high quality video content - for TV, Telephony and new services like Telemedicine fex. 2 Megabit is not sufficient for this, 10MB would be a better minimum target/expectation. This has to be symmetric too. But ideally all would have a 100MB/s link, with the absolute minimum standard being 10MB/s for a relativly small percentage.

I think also that in order for this to be a meaningful target the expectation should be that if you live within a certain distance (to be defined) from the exchange or from the digital village pump you would get the 100MB/s service. ie. fex. only 2% of any community would be on 10MB/s with 98% on 100MB/s.

I think that it is critical that the Eden Declaration is tightened up to be clear on this issue, I do think the numbers matter as Cumbria County Council will have to put something about this in any tender and people need to know what they are fighting for. At the moment that could be as low as 2 MB/s for all.