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Lots of congratulations to Libby Bateman, who was at the House of Lords this afternoon to pick up her £5000 prize for winning  TalkTalk’s North West Digital Hero award 2011.

Libby Bateman with Charles Dunstone, chairman of Talk Talk, Martha Lane-Fox, UK Digital Champion, and others at the House of Lords.

She beat two other nominees to win the prize. She sadly missed out on the national prize of £10,000 but will come back to Cumbria with £5000 for the East Cumbria Community Broadband Forum.

In case you missed them, here are the articles about Libby in the Westmorland Gazette and the News & Star.

Well done Libby!

At 9am this morning, Fujitsu unveiled plans to rival BT Openreach and build an open-access wholesale fibre network to deliver next-generation broadband to 5 million homes and businesses in rural parts of the UK.

This announcement is terrific news for those of us who are keen to see a fair fight for Cumbria’s £121m contract for broadband and IT services.

The network will deliver fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband capable of 1Gbps (both upstream and downstream) from day one. Cisco technology will be used to underpin the network and Virgin Media and TalkTalk have agreed to use it to expand their next-generation broadband offerings.

Best of all, this Fujitsu-led consortium announced that they ‘will actively support the involvement of local community broadband groups, enabling dynamic and flexible solutions in rural communities for the first time.” That means you!

To read the full press release, click here. Think Broadband have covered it here.

But there is a catch…

The plans rely on getting access to BT Openreach’s underground ducts and telegraph poles on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. As some of you know, this hasn’t been straightforward. Last week, a letter to Ed Vaizey signed by Fujitsu and Virgin Media was leaked, in which they threatened to boycott the BDUK pilots unless BT revised its prices for duct and pole access. Watch this space…