UK cities divide up fast broadband cash

Londoners should benefit from promised "super-fast" download speeds

The government has announced how it will share the money promised to 10 UK cities to allow them to create superfast broadband networks.

London gets the largest share of the £114m pot with £25m, followed by Leeds and Bradford, which will divide £14.4m.

The money will be used to build city-wide networks, offering homes and businesses speeds of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second).

The government wants to make the UK the fastest place in Europe by 2015.

A further £50m is to be awarded to ten smaller cities.

Digital leaders

New culture secretary Maria Miller promised last week to cut the red tape associated with broadband rollouts.

She hopes that the city networks can be built soon.

"These 10 cities have produced ambitious and comprehensive plans, which will turn them into digital leaders, and give their local economies a real boost," she said.

The new investment will help put these cities at the centre of the digital stage, competing for jobs and investment with the best in the world," she added.

However, the Labour Party accused the minister of spin.

"This government is disguising its failure to roll out universal broadband by making yet another re-announcement about the superconnected cities programme," said the Shadow Minister for Media and Telecoms, Helen Goodman.

"It is also unlikely that the government will meet its target of rolling out super-fast broadband to 90% of premises by 2015."

Alongside the government money, each city is expected to invest some of its own funds in the broadband projects.

The 10 cities' plans are expected to bring superfast broadband access (offering speeds between 80 and 100 megabits per second) to around an extra 230,000 residential and 55,000 business premises as well as high speed wireless to even more.

All the networks are due to be completed by 2015.