Your piece in the WMN, Dec 18:

http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/South-West-telecoms-firms-ready-phase-2/story-28389453-detail/story.html

makes an excellent marketing piece for Connecting Devon & Somerset, but you are misleading your readers with this supposed good news story when infact CDS is a basket case compared to almost every other county council run superfast broadband programme in England:

What you don’t tell readers is that:

1) This is CDS’s third attempt to find Phase 2 suppliers after they dumped 25 suppliers who attended their previous Phase 2 supplier day in 2014 and then failed to secure an exclusive contract with BT in June 2015.

2) Devon & Somerset are now one year behind almost every other County in England at getting Phase 2 off the ground.

3) That contract negotiations with BT collapsed in June because not one District Council in Devon would commit a penny of match funding because CDS would not tell them what they would be buying for their money.
Read the quotes from East Devon District Council’s Leader, Paul Diviani on the EDDC website about why he would not give match funding to CDS and now wants to run his own programme!!!…..

http://eastdevon.gov.uk/news/2015/12/east-devon-district-council-will-pursue-pivotal-broadband-project-on-behalf-of-its-communities/

4) Now that the EU State Aid for the programme expired on June 30, an exemption agreement is having to be negotiated with Brussels and the EU Competition Commissioner is forcing the Phase 2 contract to be broken up into 6 or more small contracts for smaller areas of the two counties and that any supplier who is awarded a contract will be required to make all their infrastructure (fibre cable, ducts, masts, DSLAM cabinets etc etc) available to all their competitors to use.

Rather than the good news story CDS would have you believe this is, CDS are simply picking up the pieces of their two previous failed attempts to find suppliers and worst of all, having wasted two years, council budgets are tighter for 2016 than they were in 2015, so that when contracts with suppliers may possibly be signed in the second half of 2016, there is likely to be less money available for the Phase 2 programme than their was in June 2015.

And who suffer as a result of this incompetence?…….Devon & Somerset’s rural taxpayers who are being left out of this digital age.