Despite frequent challenges, particularly from the telecommunications industry and the dominant national carrier, which held a monopoly outside the urban areas, the RBCs managed to defend the 2 Mbit/s standard against much cheaper emerging ADSL alternatives.
When the lower relative costs of these highly contended products were taken into account, e.g. £360 per annum rather than £3,600, it was extremely difficult to persuade many educationalists and even many in the IT industry of the advantages of constantly available uncontended high-bandwidth.
[citation needed] In the first wave, local authorities in eight regions were deemed to have submitted successful bids and granted a share of a total of £35 million of funding in 2000.
Had the fourteen in the West Midlands, the thirty-three in London and the half-dozen in the Bristol area been made aware of this back door procedure for obtaining funding there is little doubt that they too would have opted out of the DfES official process.
[citation needed] The funding level had now (2001) risen to an aggregate £44 million pa. At a meeting on 27 September 2001, the leading NGfL officer, Doug Brown, formally requested the ten RBC managers to produce a plan for connecting up their networks.