Northern Ireland gets £4.4m to help fund broadband rollout

Northern Ireland is to receive a government bursary of £4.4m towards broadband rollout, it was announced today.

This compares with the £56.9m awarded to Wales, with the amount allocated to Scotland to be announced tomorrow.

These funds come from the £530m broadband investment fund, with distribution determined by Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), a body housed within the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

The devolved governments in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales will determine how the funds should be allocated.

In England, however, the government has decided that funds should be distributed directly to counties and a number of pilot projects have been launched including schemes in North Yorkshire and Devon and Somerset.

The investment fund aims to ensure that even remote areas of Britain can access broadband speeds of at least 2Mbit/s.

At just 8.3 per cent of the government's £530m broadband investment fund, Northern Ireland's allocation has come way below that allocated to Wales, and is likely to be much lower than that allocated to Scotland.

A spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said of the bursary: "Northern Ireland has already invested significant amounts of money in high-speed broadband for the country, in fact 97 per cent of homes in Northern Ireland have a good connection, this compares with just 50 per cent of homes in Wales."

The spokesperson also said Scotland is more like Wales than Northern Ireland in terms of the infrastructure it has in place.

Each country's funding allocation is based on the cost of taking superfast broadband to those premises that would not receive it from the market alone. It is not based on the number of people living or working in a country.

The private sector on its own will take superfast broadband to around two-thirds of UK households and businesses. Public money is being used to help take broadband to the remaining one third by making it viable for business to invest.