Somerset gear up for the future.

You have probably heard by now that the Somerset and Devon bid for funds to develop a high speed BroadBand network across both counties has been successful. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) put everyone out of their misery early on Friday morning when they announced that Somerset and Devon were to receive £31 million out of a total pot of £50 million to bring high speed BroadBand to the South West.

It is difficult to over estimate how important this announcement is, whilst it will be great for all of us that use the internet to have world leading connection speeds, it is business that will be the primary beneficiaries, and the fact that we will have the infrastructure in place will have a profoud impact on the prospects for business growth.

The bid model indicates that this injection of investment will bring an extra 50,000 jobs to the two counties and £750 million in extra turnover, in an area that has traditionally had lower than average incomes with higher than average house prices, an injection of business at the predicted level will have a dramatic impact on prosperity.

When the project is completed it is predicted that over 85% of people will have access to super fast BroadBand, with speeds up to 200 magabytes per second. If we compare that with what we have currently, many rural areas have virtually no BroadBand at all, and when there is a connection they are lucky to have speeds of 1 or 2 mbps. Even in the major towns it is unusual to have speeds over 10 mbps, I live just over a mile from the Shepton exchange and my speed is 8 mbps.

Direct connection to a fibre optic pipe will certainly give speeds in excess of 200 mbps, but even if the fibre optic pipe is only brought to the local junction box, with the original copper connection from there to the house it is likely that we will see 40 mbps or more in the majority of homes.

With more and more remote working, or "agile working" as it is sometimes called, it is essential that households have access to good communications to enable development to continue.