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Skullduggery suspected in Oxford: boost for WiFi broadband?

A new "ginger group" for the county of Oxfordshire has been created, following suspicions that the county Council is not equal to the task of solving the need for rural broadband: wireless may be the solution.

The delays have actually led to the withdrawal of a grant which had been made to the local authority to facilitate broadband provision.

Activist Paul Tate has discovered that the South East Area development authority, SEEDA, had provided cash - but that things weren't moving fast enough to satisfy either local residents, or SEEDA itself.

Oxfordshire County Council was given some funding; £30,000 for demand aggregation and £50,000 for wireless broadband trials. Tate reports that both pieces of funding were 2002/2003 budgeted items and were made available in January 2003.

"In July I was told by SEEDA that OCC had not yet applied for any of it," Tate told a local group, which he has created a Web site for.

"Eventually following several emails to the leader of the County Council I was informed that they had applied for it, spent a bit of the £30,000 on some consultancy (the consultant phoned all the local campaigners and put a report together based on those conversations) and allocated the balance to three (possibly four) Oxfordshire campaigns for trials."

Subsequently, there was a public meeting, reports Tate in his latest newsletter to members. "After several months of planning OCC told us at this public meeting (at the end of September) that they had received the contract with SEEDA and the ICT department had passed the baton to the Development Department of the County. The White Horse Broadband group immediately sent in their plan for a pilot."

That, they thought, was the launch. Not a bit of it! "On Wednesday of this week Martin Stott of the County Council informed WHBB that the SEEDA/OCC contract would not be signed and that the funds would not be disbursed as he didn't have the resource in his department to manage it."

Tate and his activists will now bypass the Council. The SEEDA people have aggregated the original funds into their new scheme launched today on SeeOnline.net

Tate and his group have now formed ORB - Oxford Rural Broadband, which is in the process of starting a series of public events:

Crown and Cushion Hotel, Chipping Norton, 28 October

Villiers Hotel, Buckingham, 29 October

Sudbury House Hotel, Faringdon, 30 October

Badgemore Park Golf Club, Henley-on-Thames, 3 November

Whitehill Centre, Chesham, 6 November

Spread Eagle Hotel, Thame 12 November

Aylesbury Football Club, Aylesbury, 13 November

Wilton Hall, Milton Keynes, 18 November

Rye Hill Golf Club, Banbury, 19 November

Contact paul.tate at broadband4wroxton.org.uk - type it in correctly, obviously! - if you're interested in helping.