Residents in Oxfordshire village pledge £60,000 for high-speed broadband At the moment, the village has zero to one megabyte download speed, so it is really not broadband at all. I have run businesses in Asia and other far-flung places and could get broadband at a high speed. Mr Pruden made contact with a director of BT through a friend and after several months the company told him that the cost to the village of providing high-speed broadband would be £30,000. He said: "It was great to find that there was a way of doing it, though there would need to be a considerable amount of support from the village and I wondered how we would do it. BT said it would subsidise the total investment, thought to be around £100,000. I decided to approach the parish council, principally to get details to the village through the newsletter. The council was very interested and said it was a great idea. About 70 residents attended a recent meeting and there was unanimous support for the idea. However, by then BT said the cost of bringing high-speed broadband the village had doubled to almost £60,000. Mr Pruden said: "That changed the rules a little bit as we needed to raise more money. We used the village newsletter, knocked on doors and established a mailing list to raise support and get an idea of how many people would pledge money. I also approached the Phillimore Estate as they have a considerable number of properties in the area. They made a generous pledge of support and without that we would not be where we are now. A second meeting held in the village hall earlier this month was attended by more than 90 residents. It was announced that the fund-raising target of £56,075 had been exceeded, with pledges totalling £59,575. Residents had until the weekend to fulfil their pledges, which ranged from £100 to £1,500 per household. Mr Pruden said: "We have had a contribution from around 120 houses in the village, which is around 55 to 60 per cent of the owned households. We hope that by the end of this year we will be seeing broadband speeds of between 50 and 60 megabytes, which is a massive change for the whole area. People will be able to start watching television on broadband - it totally changes what people can do. It will also have an impact on property values. Broadband speeds in rural areas have been falling further behind those in cities. Last year, the Country Land and Business Association Limited (CLA) warned that access to broadband internet in rural parts of Britain has been putting economic development at risk and contributing to a growing digital divide between urban areas and the countryside. In 2010, the Government committed £530million (plus an additional £300million after 2015) to ensure speeds of at least two megabits per second for the entire country by 2015, promising the best broadband network in Europe. But the CLA said that the Government's target of ensuring universal broadband coverage by 2015 is unlikely to be met. It stated in a report that while broadband "acts as an economic driver for rural businesses," between 15 and 20 per cent of people do not receive adequate speeds. Paul Rollason, chairman of Binfield Heath Parish Council, said: "I was very surprised by the support that we received but, in common with a lot of rural villages, far more people work from home than we anticipated and I think people expect to get decent broadband even in rural areas." Broadband should make it easier for rural businesses to compete on an equal footing with their urban counterparts. However, the lack of an infrastructure for fixed-line broadband simply accentuates the rural-urban digital divide," the CLA said. Any surplus funds collected will be used in the village at the discretion of the council.