High speed broadband will be available to every community in Britain by 2015 under plans announced by the government on Monday.
A £830 million investment over the next seven years will see “digital hubs” created across the country in an attempt to ensure every home has Internet access.
The hubs, which would be linked to the nearest exchange by fibre-optic connections, will bring “superfast broadband” to 90 percent of the population, the government hopes.
The fibre upgrades will allow Internet service providers to routinely offer packages with speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (mbps).
Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, publishing “Britain’s Superfast Broadband Future”, said the plans aimed to stimulate private sector investment and create the best broadband network in Europe.
“A superfast network will be the foundation for a new economic dynamism, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and adding billions to our GDP,” Hunt said.
“But it is not just about the economy, around the world there are countless examples of superfast broadband helping to build a fairer and more prosperous society, and to transform the relationship between government and citizens.”
More than 70 percent of UK households currently have broadband and nearly 50 percent have access to a superfast 50 Mbps service.
An Ofcom study published last week, however, showed that only 0.2 percent of UK households have fibre-optic broadband, compared with 12 percent in Sweden and 34 percent in Japan.
Many rural communities in particular still struggle with slow connections.
The government says its plans will lead to telephone “cabinets” with fibre-optic links in every area, which would connect to subscribers’ homes by their existing copper lines.
And BT is expected to match all funding it receives with its own investment.
Rural Affairs Secretary Caroline Spelman said that extending superfast broadband to the countryside was “probably the single most important thing we can do to ensure the sustainability of our rural communities in the 21st Century”.
“Reliable internet access is vital for business and education, and will help to promote social inclusion and improve life in rural areas right across the country.”
Commenting on the announcement, Sebastien Lahtinen, co-founder of thinkbroadband.com, said: “I am particularly pleased to see the government has acknowledged the need to align the funding of the 2Mbps Universal Service Commitment with the next-generation broadband plans as this will help to ensure rural consumers are not always lagging behind the urban population when it comes to new and innovative services which require faster speeds.”
David Palmer, Senior Product Manager for cloud computing provider Star, said: “As a provider of broadband to businesses, our customers will always select the fastest service they can get. 24Mbps broadband if it’s available; if not they’ll go for 8Mbps; failing that, they will reluctantly settle for 2Mbps. In five years time, no business is going to accept the 2Mbps option. 40Mbps and 100Mbps broadband are now emerging and this is what the business community is already starting to request.”
Palmer continued: “The move to Cloud Computing is gathering pace and will only drive demand for more and more bandwidth. Application content is getting richer and people are working remotely often from home, where broadband is the only viable connectivity option. 2Mbps may be sufficient today but before long, working efficiently and productively on a 2Mbps connection will become near impossible.
In contrast, in Australia they are proposing 100Mbps to 90% of their population by 2018. If this goes ahead this will make the UK proposal look exceedingly un-ambitious and may put us at an economic disadvantage. Should we be at least aiming for 10Mbps?”
