 £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.In 1999, the one hundred and fifty or so upper tier English councils responsible for providing a schools' education service were provided with small sums of money (about £150,000 per region) to submit bids to create regional consortia in order to implement a schools broadband connectivity programme.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.