UK-Wide Broadband Plan Attacked

mumhaabu

www.sky.com/news
UK-Wide Broadband Plan Attacked
3:03pm UK, Thursday January 29, 2009


Plan is to extend high-speed internet to everywhere in the UK

At the moment, BT is required to provide a phone line for everyone in the country, but the new scheme would see the introduction of a new industry-wide obligation to provide broadband universally.

It is contained in a report by Lord Carter, the communications, technology and broadcasting minister, which lays out the government's blueprint for Britain's future online development.

Around 40% of British households already have broadband internet access, and the UK digital economy is thought to be worth around £50bn.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said internet connections were "as essential to our future prosperity in the 21st Century as roads, bridges, trains and electricity were in the 20th".

Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Communications Minister Lord Carter

Gordon Brown and Lord Carter

"Even at this difficult time for the economy, we will not turn our backs on the future, we will build bridges to the future," he said.

However, shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt described the plans as a disappointment.

He said they simply outlined a series of consultations would take place, and did not make clear how the objective of universal internet access would be achieved.

And Ben Camm-Jones, news editor at Web User magazine, warned the UK had a lot to do to catch up with the likes of France, Scandinavia, South Korea and Japan.

He also said that coverage would not be equal across the UK, and that people in urban areas who were prepared to pay for it would end up with connections up to 50 times faster than those elsewhere.

"I think a good, fast broadband network is going to be crucial for the economy," he told Sky News.

"But there's going to be a big difference between what people in urban centres and people in remote areas can get.

"In the future we may have a situation where people in built-up areas will have a 50-100 megabits per second (mbps) connection, whereas people in remote areas will only have 2mbps."

Culture Secretary: The Future Is Digital

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham defended the plans, saying that the 2mbps speed aspired to in the plans was higher than minimum universal connection speeds in France or Sweden.

"This is a historic commitment," he said.

"It's a very important statement on the path to a fully digital society."

Lord Carter's final report, called Digital Britain, will be published in June.

It is also set to address the issues of illegal file-sharing and music piracy on the internet.

Laws could be introduced to force internet service providers to hand over details of people who use the web to break copyright laws.


In the mean time we get 28.8kbps as our universal speed and we have righteous reichstag ryan leading the world with an insanely stupid plan that is the NBB (plan was good, Three are not good). and yet even the UK moves on light years ahead of us, we now have censorship thanks to Errorcom also. We just keep digging ourselves deeping into a black hole funded by quangos and the greens.

oscarBravo

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/29_01_09digital_britain_interimreport.pdf

John mac

just a quote from a caption

Kashvi Shah uses pay-as-you-surf 100Mbps broadband at her home in west London.

Ah i can only dream......:D

Sponge Bob

This is a simpler issue , in a way , in the UK

They have a functioning regulator and a solvent incumbent . In Ireland we have a cash strapped incumbent and a useless clueless regulator .

The UK has a functional LLU market with 5m lines unbundled , we should have nearly 400k ( pro rata ) and actually have 25k at most .

The UK is also well into an NGN modernisation programme of its network unlike Ireland which has a couple of intercity NGN backbone links and thats pretty much all.

We are about 4 years behind right now , way it is .