On Tuesday 31st July, we were honoured to be invited to join and celebrate 10 years of the Essex Rural Partnership.
Founded in 2002, the ERP provides a key role in uniting organisations across the county, to help build a sustainable future for rural Essex.
Lloyd Felton (County Broadband) shared the platform with a prestigious panel, including Cllr Peter Martin (Leader of Essex County Council), Cabinet member John Jowers, Sarah Hendry (Defra) and Dr Susan Priest (South East Local Enterprise Partnership).
Lloyd’s presentation on Super Fast Wireless Broadband outlined why this is the “Least Cost, Fastest to Deploy” solution for rural broadband in Essex. Broadband provision is essential to communities, not just for entertainment, but for businesses and other core activities including health provision and education. A new Essex Plan of Network Reach (supporting local network provision) will mean that the vast majority of Essex parishes will be within reach of the core network, and easily able to get faster broadband should they want service.
The key question arising from the presentation was:
“Is providing broadband to rural areas really as easy as you made it sound?”
The answer is; it can be!
We need to provide a sustainable service so we have to work with each community. The technology is there but there is not a cohesive approach in place.
We think that organisations like the ERP are perfectly placed to help bring more cohesion to rural broadband provision, and we look forward to working in partnership with other members to deliver the best solution for Essex.
We were very honoured to be one of those invited to help mark the celebration – and it was a pleasure to see such interest and support for rural Broadband!
You can find out more about the Essex Rural Partnership on their website, at http://www.essexruralpartnership.org.uk/
You can read more about how we work in partnership with individual parishes, to deliver rural broadband, here.