Coventry to become latest city with superfast connectivity
Coventry to become latest city with superfast connectivity
Coventry-based businesses and charities are going to be given vouchers of up to £3,000 in a new scheme to help improve their broadband connection.
The Super Connected Coventry scheme is being funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport as part of the Super Connected Cities and Superfast Britain initiatives. The overall goal is to help local businesses and charities improve the day-to-day running of their organisations by providing faster and more reliable broadband.
The vouchers will be paid directly to broadband suppliers to cover the costs of connections for any value between £250 and £3,000. The Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) has backed the plan, which will cover anything from the Ethernet or leased lines through to wireless services.
All manner of organisations look set to benefit from the scheme including larger businesses, charities, SMEs, social enterprises, third-party organisations or even agents and landlords, as long as they fall within Coventry City Council’s boundary.
Councillor Lynnette Kelly, cabinet member for business, enterprise and employment and LEP board director, stated that the plan to provide better broadband to the city was very positive news. She said: “It can be extremely frustrating for companies when their day-to-day business is delayed because of a slow broadband service.
“Super Connected Coventry is designed to boost connectivity by improving communication with customers and staff, reducing costs because work is carried out more efficiently, improving data storage and accessibility, introducing higher speeds for uploading and downloading larger files and improving service reliability.”
With this introduction of this scheme Coventry will be joining the likes of Newcastle and Belfast on the UK’s exclusive list of super-connected cities. The developments come from when, in 2011, the government set aside an initial funding pot of £100 million – called the Urban Broadband Fund – which has since been added to in a bid to give over 20 of the UK’s cities access to superfast broadband.
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(Image: Herry Lawford)
