A bungled broadband project in South Yorkshire has been scrapped – the experts estimate that the final cost to local authorities was more than £80 million.

Indeed, the Digital Region broadband project was supposed to provide 98% high speed coverage to the South Yorkshire area, but despite grant and loan funding from the currently defunct Yorkshire Forward group, the above mentioned project takeup appeared very low. As a result, no large Internet service providers signed up to the network. Although Digital Region was supposed to be a self financing project allowing to bring growth to the area, it only had 3,000 paying customers against the initial 108,000 forecast.

In the meantime, £45 million in public money was lent to the Digital Region along with the £80 million figure, which was ultimately written off by Yorkshire Forward. According to councils, they had to come to a decision that it would be more cost effective to cancel the service instead of finding private sector partners.

At the moment, there is at least 80% coverage across South Yorkshire, but it has been reached with the help of the private sector, not Digital Region. The local authorities admitted that there are clearly some lessons to be learned because the project has not performed as anticipated. It seems that someone needs to understand why it happened like that and make sure nobody gets in that position again.