{"id":40894,"date":"2012-06-27T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-27T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.corporate-eye.com\/blog\/?p=40894"},"modified":"2012-06-27T15:58:09","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T14:58:09","slug":"digital-divide-rural-broadband","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.corporate-eye.com\/main\/digital-divide-rural-broadband\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Champions and the Digital Divide"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"rural<\/span>The county I live in, Cheshire—a large county in the north of the UK—has ambitious plans: aiming for 100% coverage of superfast broadband by 2015.<\/p>\n

For some of you, who live in big cities or in other countries, this won’t seem much. Apparently 50% or more of European households already have a connection of over 100 Mbps, and the EU definition of superfast is only 30 Mbps.<\/p>\n

But Cheshire is a rural county: 60% is classified as rural, and the settlements are small and dispersed. That is, a lot of us live in tiny villages that are scattered across the green countryside. Yes, that is an image of Cheshire countryside to the right.<\/p>\n

For two-thirds of the geographical area of the county it is simply not viable for telecommunications companies to roll out superfast broadband without financial subsidies. <\/p>\n

A challenge, in these straitened times.<\/p>\n

I went to a Connecting Cheshire<\/a> Digital Champions event last week, representing the tiny village I live in, and was struck by two things that follow from the statistics they shared:<\/p>\n