Wee Dougie takes the first steps to broadband aggregation

Ecommerce minister Douglas Alexander has taken the first step towards government support for broadband, though contracts are still a long way off.

The government has started formally looking at how it might start aggregating public sector demand in market towns into one single contract large enough to justify a private company investing in broadband infrastructure.

Once the company has invested in infrastructure to meet the government contract, they can then sell spare capacity to businesses and consumers in the area, who wouldn't be a big enough market on their own.

The government adopted this as official policy at the end of last year, and it's now starting to put it into practice. The Office of Government Commerce (OGC), the office of the treasury that deals with public procurement, is to prepare a report into how it might be done.

Getting all the public bodies to agree to buy into a single contract is not a simple matter, and the government is now looking at how it might be able to make it happen.

It's a mere two months after Tony Blair announced that he would ask the OGC to do it - which, by Government standards, is relatively fast.