The Soham Telephone Exchange went ADSL Broadband Live on Wednesday 15th October 2003.

The winners out of 87 communities from the Eastern Region who successfully entered the final stages of the East of England Development Agency (EEDA) 'Connecting Communities Competition' have been announced. EEDA delayed the announcement of the winners due to fact that they needed to go back and re-assess how the reduction of Trigger Levels by BT had affected the requirements of each entry bid. The East Cambridgeshire Rural Broadband Partnership bid that covers all the areas of the District that can't get broadband at present has been successful. EEDA announced the winning communities of the competition on Wednesday 23rd July 2003. Soham, Littleport, Ely and Sutton have all reached their target Trigger Levels for the BT Telephone Exchanges to be upgraded to allow ADSL Broadband. The Soham Telephone Exchange will go ADSL Live on Wednesday 15th October 2003 so you can start pre-ordering a Broadband  connection from an ISP supplier now. The winning communities of the EEDA 'Connecting Communities Competition'  are as follows:-

The competition, was part of the EEDA's Demand Broadband campaign, designed to speed up internet access to rural sites and help small businesses compete with those in metropolitan settings. With its scattered population, and few large urban centres, the east of England has many communities that broadband suppliers have said it is not commercially viable to connect. Groups of individuals from villages and companies were invited to apply for part of a £2.5 million fund to connect their communities to broadband. The winners were selected from 87 final entries in three categories - larger settlements, large villages/small towns and smaller villages - across the six EEDA counties. More than 2,000 people requested applications for the competition. Anglia TV's Graham Creelman, chairman of Living East, said the competition's design meant that even unsuccessful bids would still provide EEDA with a huge amount of detail about demand across the region. The information received from all the communities who entered the EEDA competition will be passed to 50 broadband suppliers which have registered with the agency. Mr Creelman said: "This is exactly how we hoped the competition would work to speed up the supply of broadband." By the end of the year, according to Mason Communications, 84 per cent of the region's population will be able to access broadband. Two years ago, it was predicted that just 63% of the eastern counties would have access to high-speed internet connections.