AN URGENT appeal was this week issued to residents and businesspeople in Tavistock to express their support for a campaign to bring superfast broadband to the town.

John Sheldon, the town council's 'broadband champion', said Tavistock was now 'on its own' in its struggle to get the superfast fibre network needed to obtain download speeds greater than 24 megabits per second.

He said: 'Tavistock is not being funded in the now named "Heart of the South West Local Broadband Plan" to receive any improvement.

'At the moment, Connecting Devon and Somerset have a  demand survey to enable the use of its funding and it has been confirmed to me that if we do take part, the results will be shown to the people who are going to install networks in other areas.'

Cllr Sheldon said Tavistock was in 'a grey area', in that it was deemed to have adequate broadband speeds and was not considered to be in need of economic development.

But he said for businesses to be able to compete online, in a rapidly changing and developing sector of the market, superfast broadband was vital: 'I have met with BT at the  highest level in the South West and there would be no difficulty in getting superfast broadband here if we were to be selected.

'Our only opportunity at present is to be chosen within BT's plans — that is the £2.5-billion investment covering 66 per cent of the UK which will be complete at the end of 2014.'

He urged businesses and residents to go to http://www.superfast.me.uk">www.superfast.me.uk for more information and to complete the demand survey.

'Any completion of the survey and expressing interest to BT Openreach can only benefit Tavistock,' said Cllr Sheldon.

 Nigel Eadie, chairman of Tavistock Chamber of Commerce, said obtaining superfast broadband was 'absolutely critical' to the economic viability of the town and surrounding area: 'You can put it in one word — jobs. It's as simple as that.

'Towns and communities that have it will see job creation and those that don't will see job migration. We have had a couple of real life examples of this in Tavistock just recently, where businesses that wanted to set up here ended up going to Plymouth or the edge of Plymouth because there was no superfast broadband here.'

Chris Penberthy, manager of Tavistock Business Improvement District (BID), said: 'We want Tavistock to thrive and we need it to have the best broadband connections, so the BID is backing this campaign — superfast broadband is good not just for business but for people choosing to live here as well.'

A spokesman for BT said the company was not directly involved in Heart of the South West or Connecting Devon and Somerset, but that representatives were due to attend a meeting in Tavistock, organised by John Sheldon, in April, to discuss superfast broadband.

He confirmed BTs intention to invest £2.5-billion in rolling out the superfast network to two thirds of homes and businesses by the end of 2014.

He added: 'Exchanges are announced in a rolling programme and more will be announced in the coming months.

'However, Tavistock exchange has already been upgraded with Ethernet, a high speed cost-effective communications technology aimed at businesses, which is capable of providing speeds up to 10Gb/s depending on requirements.'