Following the enormous turnout this weekend from individuals signing up for the heavily-discounted Blueskies broadband initiative, the government yesterday announced the offer for broadband subscriptions at e3 per month is to be extended until 8 February.
Saturday and Sunday saw the streets of Valletta and Victoria teeming with people queuing up to sign up for the special offer. The initiative will see the government teaming up with internet service providers for the one-year initiative, in which the government will be subsiding, at a total cost of over e1 million, e17 of the average monthly internet subscription price of e20 – leaving just e3 for subscribers to fork out per month.
Speaking yesterday, Industry, Investments and IT Minister Austin Gatt said that although 4,557 people had subscribed for the initiative this weekend, some had complained they had not been able to get down to the specified locations at the stipulated times.
Responding to what has been gauged as continued demand for the scheme, a decision has been taken to extend the offer until 8 February. This time around, however, those interested will not have to brave daunting queues.
Instead, application forms, which can be posted in once completed, can be collected from all Maltapost branches. Students will be able to pick up application forms from their schools, the disabled from the National Commission for Persons with a Disability, STMicroelectronics employees from the company itself, while the YMCA will also have applications available.
Speaking yesterday, Dr Gatt observed how the new broadband subscriptions made available through the scheme should place Malta among the leading EU states in terms of broadband penetration – an area that has been growing on its own steam over recent years, but not fast enough.
But, Dr Gatt said, “This is not enough, we have to be the best and the Blue Skies initiative is aimed at pushing the rates beyond the top EU averages.”
The government, Dr Gatt said, had never set a limit of 5,000 subscriptions to be made available through the Blueskies offer, as the opposition has been saying, but rather that the 5,000 figure had merely been the government’s target.
The scheme’s aim, Dr Gatt said, was to stimulate the broadband market in such a way that consumers would see the real value of high speed internet access, while at the same time the industry would be inspired to lower its prices once it sees what a large market there was for such access.
Bandwidth availability, he added, is set to explode in the near future, with the new submarine link to Italy announced recently by Go alone providing for a 200 gigabit bandwidth as against the 4.5 gigabits available at present.
Three more schemes, along the same lines of developing Malta into a centre of information technology excellence over the coming years, are also about to be announced in the coming days or weeks.
One is the offer of refurbished public sector computers to be made available to disadvantaged people at nominal prices, another will help first time computer buyers and owners of outdated computers to purchase new computer systems, while the third involves a popular software application. More details on the three schemes, Dr Gatt said, would be announced in due course.