Cambridgeshire brings outlying constituents online

Twenty nine million pounds sounds like a lot of money to spend on a broadband council network, especially in a principally rural county such as Cambridgeshire.

The county does boast Silicon Fen, home to one of the most advanced technology research and business centres in the world, where bandwidth is plentiful.

But for Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC) to meet its e-government targets - which require all local government services to be available electronically by - its constituents had to be adequately connected.

The council is getting a little more for its £29m than fibre optic links to technological backwaters.

The money is also being used to upgrade its existing council network and endow schools, community centres and council offices with broadband internet links, plus PCs and associated hardware.

The council has found shrewd ways to pay the service, including a £12m government grant.

The rest was pulled off by merging existing programmes and budgets, such as the networking budgets for schools and libraries, and four other county schemes that were already busy putting high-speed internet connections into community outlets such as pubs and post offices.

'It gives us the sort of service we want without increasing our IT budgets,' says head of IT John Little.

The council expects 400 of these community access points to be in place by 2004.

The financing of the deal is unusual. NTL Business, the organisation providing and managing the network, has to meet service and performance targets to receive full payment, and then spread over eight years. If NTL performs badly enough, it will not get paid at all.