The Preston City Council (PCC) in Lancashire (England) recently announced that it will be the founding member of a new Preston Digital Cooperative (PDC) organisation, which seeks to promote digital inclusion across communities in the city through the deployment of new digital infrastructure (e.g. free broadband WiFi) and enhancing digital skills.
The cooperative is being set up as a way to “bring together public, voluntary and private organisations” working to improve access to connectivity, devices and skills across the city for digitally excluded people and communities. It will use UK Shared Prosperity Funding (UKSPF) to help provide “free [internet] connectivity in some areas, refurbished devices for residents that need them, and free digital skills training“.
NOTE: PCC was awarded £5.2m UKSPF monies from the UK Government to be spent across 2023/24 and 2024/25.
The Community Broadband Network (CBN), which works with local authorities, businesses and NGOs – both in the UK and internationally – to help develop transformational and sustainable digital infrastructure, is also supporting the new organisation.
Councillor Matthew Brown, Leader at Preston City Council, said:
“As a growing number of its own services are now digitally based, it is important that the Council leads by example. The work of the Preston Digital Cooperative will help to tackle the digital divide and improve digital inclusion, ensuring that our residents have equal access. It also fits with our Community Wealth Building principles of anchor collaboration and democratic ownership.
In the longer term we will explore how Preston Digital Cooperative can be an alternative, ethical provider in the market working with and supporting our local communities and businesses.”
Shaun Fensom, Chair at Community Broadband Network, added:
“We are excited to be working with Preston City Council and other organisations across the city to set up and be involved with Preston Digital Cooperative. It is an opportunity to develop and build on our work in other regions across the UK for more than 20 years.
The cooperative will work on innovative ways to source and distribute devices and enable free wireless broadband connectivity in selected places across the city.”
We should highlight that CBN is also a founding member of the Cooperative Network Infrastructure (CNI) scheme in Tameside, Blackpool, Manchester and Sussex, which has done a reasonable job of enabling the commercial re-use of existing local authority owned cable ducts and fibre to aid the roll-out of gigabit-capable broadband.
Various network operators like Virgin Media, CityFibre, Telcom, ITS Technology, F&W Networks and others have benefitted from that and it’s possible we may see something similar emerge in the Preston area.
In terms of gigabit-capable broadband coverage, Preston is already well covered by Virgin Media’s network and there’s significant FTTP coverage from Openreach, CityFibre, ITS Technology and Netomnia, albeit still a bit patchy in places. Some smaller deployments also exist or were being planned by Grain, Hyperoptic and MS3.