In business? In a rural area? Want broadband? Well here's how to get it...

From Martin Edwards, managing director, ReviewMedia Ltd

We've followed the numerous whinging "We can't get broadband" stories on silicon.com for a while now - many of them fully justified of course. But there are a few rural success stories around and we are one of them.

As a publisher of local directories and the county magazine - The Shropshire Review - we find that trying to shuffle our files around to printers and clients is an absolute nightmare in the so called 'digital workflow age'.

Tourism brings in money to our area but mainly supports low paid jobs. Our industry and commerce is important to us but we need good telecoms links to provide inward investment opportunities into the market town where we are based - Bridgnorth in Shropshire.

BT have set a ridiculous trigger level of 750 for Bridgnorth, whereas Ludlow, which is a slightly smaller town and 20 miles further east towards the Welsh Border, has a level of just 350.

Word 'underground' is that the condition of the wiring here is in a pretty poor state. If this is true then not only have we been disadvantaged being a rural area, but it seems that we are also competing on an uneven playing field with our other rural neighbours.

Bridgnorth is a great place to live, it's an area that naturally attracts highly skilled professional people who want to work from home - my in-box is filled daily with requests from readers desperate for a decent connection so that they can cut down on a regular commute as far a field as London, over 200 miles away. But trying to persuade BT to upgrade their infrastructure here was a complete non-starter.

The situation was beginning to worry us, as it has become quite evident that teleworking professionals - many of them from the IT industry - will probably be one of the strongest elements of our local economy over the next few years. And there lies an irony - because during the 1930s and 40s Bridgnorth's AT&E factory was full of boffins at the cutting edge of research into radio transmission manufacturing technology. As well as top secret radar development for the war effort we also 'invented' the BBC radio pips (if you want to know more, go to www.shropshirereview.co.uk and search on 'Pale Meadow'. Funny how things come, go and come back around again.)

However, in our effort to once again recreate the Silicon Severn Valley, we thought you might like to know what can be achieved with a little quiet effort behind the scenes... Rather than waste time persuading our readers to sign up for BT's broadband registration promotion, we looked at what our county council and the various regional and local agencies were doing.

We found that our county council had recently put a large amount of money towards providing a network for Shropshire schools, but it wasn't suitable for businesses to lock into. However, they were working on one or two other schemes.

They also put us in touch with our Regional Development Agency, Advantage West Midlands who were putting together a Broadband pilot scheme for areas such as ours. We set up a meeting with their consultants, Analysys, attended by our local MP Matthew Green (my faith in politicians has been much restored) and persuaded them that we had the contact on the ground to make Bridgnorth a successful starting point for the project.

We invited business and community leaders to a launch event entitled 'Bricks, Broadband and Beyond' which explained the potential effects of broadband on the future development of our local economy, highlighting the need to plan strong telecoms links into buildings and infrastructure.

We have now been designated the lead business to roll out the message to over 700 businesses in the area and are currently waiting for the telco and delivery system to be announced which should be in place by next spring.

Our message to anyone having difficulty in their area:

* Find a motivated partner with a good grassroots connection to the local business community, particularly one that has the ability to communicate and gather support - ideally a local publisher like ourselves.

* Search around for grant schemes that could be utilised to create a pilot project. Your county council's IT and/or economic development departments, Business Link, Local UK Online and Regional Development Agency are good starting points.

* Get your local MP on board - your parliamentry representative should be active at a constituency level in helping to promote important economic development issues such as Broadband (if not, then vote them out at the next election). Your MP will have good contacts at both county and regional level and will lend weight and credibility to your proposals - so endeavour to get them to attend any high level meetings.

It might be that we were just in the right place at the right time - but thanks to Advantage West Midlands and a bit of quiet graft on our part, we're getting broadband, so we don't care - it worked for us!

Martin Edwards
medwards@reviewmedia.com