WMnet
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WMnet [1] is the tag name for the West Midlands Regional Broadband Consortium, an association of local councils in the West Midlands of England created under the aegis of the the Department for Education and Skills National Grid for Learning Programme in 2001.
The West Midlands in the title refers to an English administrative region which stretches from the Peak District in the north down to the Wye and Severn valleys in the South; its Western boundary is the Welsh border and it incorporates most of the Welsh Marches in Shropshire and Herefordshire. To the East it stretches as far as Rugby, in Warwickshire and the M1 motorway. It contains some very substantial English cities in Stoke on Trent, Wolverhampton, Coventry and Birmingham. Its population of 5.5 million is slightly in excess of that of Scotland and about one-ninth of the English total. This greater West Midlands region is not to be confused with another, smaller, West Midlands to which most other Wikipedia articles at least superficially refer and whose existence has been challenged elsewhere in these pages on the basis that this short-lived metropolitan county achieved little but a reputation for corruption. Cultural identification with the West Midlands is weak in the sense that most residents would be unlikely to claim to live there and perhaps a majority are unaware that they reside there. Inhabitants are more likely to say that they come from Birmingham, from Stafford, from Stoke, or the Black Country.
WMnet members are
| Birmingham City Council |
| Coventry City Council |
| Dudley Borough Council |
| Herefordshire Council |
| Sandwell Borough Council |
| Shropshire County Council |
| Solihull Borough Council |
| Staffordshire County Council |
| Stoke City Council |
| Telford and Wrekin Borough Council |
| Walsall Borough Council |
| Warwickshire County Council |
| Wolverhampton City Council |
| Worcestershire County Council |
(Originally the Regional Development Agency, Advantage West Midlands, played an active role in WMnet affairs, but that has ceased to be the case.)
The name WMnet was invented by Roger Blamire, because there is little else that can be done with the letters W and M. One unfortunate consequence is that even the participants have never agreed on a pronunciation. For reasons that have never been satisfactorily explained, WMnet was not funded like the most other English regions in 2000, which saw RBCs created in all the English regions bar London, the West Midlands and the Bristol area.
