GLII – UK

Going Local Scotland and Wales 2011, October 20th Cardiff, October 26th Edinburgh.


Objectives/ topics of the visit(s):

NGA Rollout (Fibre), Financing and State Aids

Although UK broadband policy is formally reserved to London, both Scotland and Wales have a degree of autonomy and have been allocated a share of BDUK funding. Scotland faces difficult deployment problems because it has a high proportion of sparsely populated land with difficult mountainous terrain. An ingenious solution and possible best practice for similar regions was demonstrated by Prof Peter Buneman based on locally developed wireless connections. Although very cost effective if highlighted the major difficulty of superfast backhaul (which it solved by connecting to the local Educational network)

Wales is in the process of a major broadband procurement exercise which prevented Welsh government officials from fully participating in the GL meeting. The procurement procedure is expected to realise the Digital Agenda target by providing all households in Wales with a 30Mbps connection by 2015.

Digital Services

The Edinburgh meeting showcased two advanced digital service infrastructures. First in education ,the University of the Highlands. This has been established to bring tertiary education to a wide sparsely populated area and is doing so by exploiting the tools of e-learning to bring teaching to multiple local communities. A key infrastructure support in the UK's Janet academic network (part of the EU Géant network) which brings high bandwidth backhaul to the Highland area). The second is the Scottish e-health network which is one of the most advanced in Europe.

RELATED ARTICLESExplain
Digital Agenda – Going Local II
GLII – UK
GL UK: Action and commitments
GL UK: Challenges and obstacles
GL UK: Status and progress
P4: Very Fast Internet
P6: Enhancing e-skills
W24: The Digital Agenda for local and regional development
GLII – Austria
GLII – Belgium
GLII – Bulgaria
GLII - Cyprus
GLII – Czech Republic
GLII – Denmark
GLII – Denmark
GLII – Estonia
GLII – Finland
GLII – France
GLII – Germany
GLII – Greece
GLII – Hungary
GLII – Ireland
GLII – Italy
GLII – Latvia
GLII – Netherlands
GLII – Norway
GLII – Poland
GLII – Portugal
GLII – Romania
GLII – Slovenia
GLII – Spain
GLII – Sweden
GLII – Switzerland
Graph of this discussion
Enter the title of your article


Enter a short (max 500 characters) summation of your article
Enter the main body of your article
Lock
+Comments (0)
+Citations (1)
+About
Enter comment

Select article text to quote
welcome text

First name   Last name 

Email

Skip