I don’t get this.

There was an article in The Times a year ago about people in Shoreditch getting the world’s fastest Internet service - 2Gb/sec.

Ministers have earmarked £12 million for the Shoreditch project as the centrepiece of its New Deal for the Communities.

That piece has been Dugg over 2000 times, with the American cousins commenting “why can’t we get speeds like that over here” etc.

This sounds like ongoing news, and the sort of thing a spinning government would want to crow about. But there’s no other reference to this project I can find. And the “powerhouse” at the centre of it, Telehouse, has nothing to say about this great project and indeed no news at all since 2006.

What gives? Did the project stop? Has some weird veil of discretion been drawn? Or is it not what it appears to be in The Times‘ piece, ie is it some shoddy Sky-TV-like initiative being pumped up to be something it isn’t by the shabby Murdoch tabloid? Here’s more of the original piece:

Introduced this month, the system will allow 20,000 households to surf the web and download material at speeds up to 2,000 times faster than present services. Users will, for example, be able to download all 32,640 pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in less than seven seconds, managers of the government-funded project said.Most commercially-available broadband connections operate at a speed of 2 megabits per second (2Mb/s), but the Shoreditch project can access internet images and content at a speed of up to 2 billions of bits per second (2Gb/s).

The key to the speed of the new system is a high-security “powerhouse” located in London’s Docklands. The Telehouse data centre houses 13,000 square metres (140,000 sq ft) of fibre-optic telecommunications and IT infrastructure required to power the most high-speed connections.

Nicknamed “CTU”, after the high-tech counter-terrorist headquarters in the American television series, 24, the Telehouse centre is said to be one of the most secure locations in Britain.

It is designed to provide back-up power for Britain’s vital network services in the event of a terrorist attack and its environmental sensors ensure that high-powered connections, such as the Shoreditch project, do not melt through excessive heat.

Any clues?

Update - the project seems to be called Digital Bridge and it refers to only one press article about - from The Sun, which tends to support the Wapping great fib theory. Digital Bridge seems to be an ISP offering community TV and Sky-like drivel over normal phone lines.