Hampshire UK Launch £1m Top-up for Rural Broadband Vouchers

The Hampshire County Council (HCC) has this week confirmed that they’re investing £1 million to “top up” any residential vouchers provided via the UK Government’s £200m Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) programme, which helps homes in the most remote locations to access ultrafast broadband.

The top-up scheme was first proposed earlier this year (here) and has now gone live. At present if you live in a rural area, where only sub-100Mbps speeds are available, then the RGC can provide vouchers worth up to £3,500 for small businesses and up to £1,500 for residents to help them get an ultrafast or “gigabit-capable” broadband ISP connection installed.

Under the new scheme any vouchers intended for residential homes (businesses seem to have been excluded from the £1m top-up) will effectively be doubled to £3,000 and if everybody claimed the maximum voucher value then that would equate to roughly 700 extra premises passed.

The vouchers will be distributed on a “first-come, first served” basis, so get them while they’re hot – here.

Councillor Stephen Reid said:

“96% of Hampshire can now access superfast broadband with speeds of 24Mbps (Megabits per second) or more. This is a fantastic achievement, but we want to extend access further. To that end we’re adding £1 million towards the Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme to target so-called “broadband not-spots” in the county.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown how important it is to have access to reliable, fast broadband, as being digitally connected is key to staying in touch with loved ones, working from home, and helping to stabilise local businesses. This initiative is designed to get high-speed broadband to areas that commercial providers simply won’t go to because of the costs involved.”

One small catch here is that you’ll only be able to claim these vouchers when acting as part of a group project (i.e. 2 or more residents), although it’s fairly normal to aggregate vouchers in order to help bring down the total cost of a new network deployment. Crucially, by increasing the value of such vouchers then you also make new infrastructure accessible to areas that might have previously found it too expensive.

On the other hand £1m is just a drop in the ocean of what will be needed to fully complete the job, but at least it’s an accessible option while we await the final framework for the Government’s proposed £5bn investment into gigabit-capable broadband delivery (here).

We should add that various other UK regions have already launched similar top-up schemes alongside the RGC.