Marketing bid to save £100m fast broadband scheme

MARKETING experts have been brought in to kick-start a struggling £100m project providing next-generation broadband across swathes of Yorkshire as managers battle to prevent the scheme becoming an expensive white elephant.

Digital Region Ltd, the company set up to install a vast new ‘superfast’ internet network across South Yorkshire with taxpayers’ and EU funding, is desperate to raise the profile of its new service as building work nears completion.

Almost £100m of public funds have now been spent on the scheme, with hundreds of miles of fibre optic cables laid beneath the streets of South Yorkshire to make the county the best-connected area in the country for the next-generation technology.

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By the end of this year, the initial building work will be completed and 80 per cent of properties in South Yorkshire will have access to the service, which offers internet speeds at least five times faster than the current national average.

But while ‘superfast’ internet has proved popular with public sector bodies and businesses, only a small number of residential users have signed up so far.

As a result, the scheme has not yet generated the profits anticipated in its original business plan – which means that the roll-out of the scheme to the last 20 per cent of the county has had to be delayed indefinitely. Project managers have blamed telecoms giant attempting to scupper their scheme as it rolls out its own rival high-speed network – a charge BT denies.

But some local internet firms have also highlighted a lack of marketing as one reason why so few home users have signed up.

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Now Digital Region bosses have brought Sheffield-based marketing firm Ruby Slippers on board to help drum up new business.

“Now we’ve actually got the network in place, we can sell it as we want to,” said Maureen Donnelly, chairwoman of Digital Region. “There’s no point in having the network if people don’t know about it. We wanted to have an agency to help us.”

The financial problems besetting the project have led Digital Region to renegotiate its contract with engineering giant Thales, which is building the network on its behalf.

The new deal sees Digital Region assume full control of all sales and marketing.

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“We thought it would work more effectively as we are based here in South Yorkshire and so we’re much closer to the project all the time,” Mrs Donnelly said.

She rejected suggestions poor marketing of the network has been a problem, however, insisting many of the benefits of superfast internet will only materialise once the service is accessible for large numbers of people.

But she added: “Marketing is always a part of it. We are a start-up business, and any start-up business has to market very hard in order to get revenue.”

Mrs Donnelly said a major advertising campaign using billboards is not on the agenda, however.

“That costs real money – way beyond the money we could or would want to spend.”

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