Regional Broadband Consortium

Regional Broadband Consortia was created in the United Kingdom in 2000 to secure lower prices for broadband connections and services for schools by aggregating demand across a region and entering into region wide contracts. They were established under the auspices of what was then known as the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) National Grid for Learning (NGfL) programme.

The Regional Broadband Consortia collectively subscribed to a 2 Mbit/s standard for broadband, for which the origins in the 1990s are unclear. It is not the case, as has been often alleged, that the RBCs created or imposed this standard on English schools, though they were active in reinforcing and publicising the standard. Though it did not appear clearly stated in the NGfL funding guidance until 2003, this standard had been inherited from various fore-running projects including the People's Library Network. 2 Mbit/s was possibly selected with a view to encouraging the use of optical fibre to the site.

Despite frequent challenges, particularly from the telecommunications industry and the dominant national carrier, which held a monopoly outside the urban areas, the RBCs managed to defend the 2 Mbit/s standard against much cheaper emerging ADSL alternatives. Some providers were describing offerings as low as 150 kbit/s as broadband and when the lower relative costs of these highly contended products were taken into account, e.g. £360 per annum rather than £3,600 it was extremely difficult to persuade many educationalists and even many in the IT industry of the advantages of constantly available uncontended high-bandwidth.

In 1999, the one hundred and fifty or so upper tier English councils responsible for providing a schools' education service were provided with small sums of money (about £150,000 per region) to submit bids to create regional consortia in order to implement a schools broadband connectivity programme. In the first wave, local authorities in eight regions were deemed to have submitted successful bids and granted a share of a total of £35 million of funding in 2000. There were two successful submissions in the North West, one from Cumbria and Lancashire and another from the majority of unitary authorities in the south of that region. Bids from the North-East, from Yorkshire and Humberside, from the East Midlands, East of England, South-East and South Western regions were also accepted. Unsuccessful bids were submitted by the West Midlands local authorities, by councils in the London area and those in the Bristol area.

...
Wikipedia