by wbhawkins
Minister seeks high-speed broadband access ideas
10:55 am in Broadband, business, internet, technology by wbhawkins
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
This recent article highlights the increasing divide between rural and urban life. With first time buyers struggling to buy homes in the countryside and the lack of access to services including transport and high-speed internet access for homes and businesses, rural life is becoming increasingly difficult and distant from those living in towns and cities.
This article was written by Graeme Wearden, for guardian.co.uk on Sunday 11th July 2010 23.04 UTC
The government will take its first steps towards tackling Britain’s broadband divide this week when it holds a summit to discuss ways of introducing high-speed internet access across the country.
Jeremy Hunt, culture secretary, will ask communications providers for ideas on how to give every home access to a basic broadband connection at an Industry Day in London on Thursday.
The meeting will also attempt to address the issue of availability of the next-generation of super-fast broadband services. At present, millions of homes and small businesses are excluded from new fibre-optic based networks being built largely in urban areas.
Having abolished Labour’s 50p a month broadband tax – a levy on fixed phone lines that was designed to raise funds to tackle the broadband divide – the coalition government says it remains committed to giving everyone a high-speed connection of at least 2 megabits a second by 2012.
About 160,000 UK homes still cannot get a broadband connection at all – a decade after services were first introduced. While BT’s ADSL broadband network now covers 99% of the population, technical limitations mean 2m homes cannot get at least 2Mbps. Industry figures welcome the government’s commitment to broadband, but warn that Hunt faces a clear dilemma – how to persuade telecoms companies to build commercially unviable networks in more rural areas in a time of austerity. Thursday’s gathering will examine how subsidies can be used to give commercial firms an incentive to invest, but the challenge of achieving full broadband coverage is formidable.
In Finland, broadband has recently been declared to be a human right. But Olivia Garfield, BT Group strategy director, warned that Britain’s budget deficit means the government is not in a position to mandate that broadband be available to everyone in Britain.”I cannot see it happening here, given the budget deficit we have.” Garfield told the Guardian.
She is hopeful that Hunt can provide “certainty and clarity” to the 80-plus companies attending Thursday’s event about the administration’s plans, including three pilot projects where public funds will subsidise introduction of broadband in existing blackspots. The location of these trials has not yet been released.
The government has committed about £300m to fund broadband schemes, money left over from the digital switchover fund. Hunt declared last month that he wants Britain to have “the best superfast broadband network in Europe” by the end of the current parliament in five years time.
BT is spending £2.5bn to introduce a new fibre-optic based network in Britain. By 2015, this should reach two-thirds of the population, giving speeds of up to 40Mbps, but BT does not currently plan to extend the network further. Virgin Media customers can already get similar faster speeds, and other telecoms operators are also building out fibre. But commercial considerations mean they are all focused on more urban parts of Britain.
“Unless the government has a few spare billion, it’s not going to resolve this issue on Thursday,” Garfield commented.
BT argues that it cannot be expected to build expensive fibre networks to areas where there are too few houses to generate a return. But the company admits that it, along with the government, will be criticised by those who find themselves trapped on the wrong side of a new broadband divide in a few years time.
“It will be so tough to understand that some people have faster speeds and you are still struggling with a slower connection,” predicted
Garfield. “There will certainly be a minority of people who want to blame someone, and they will blame us as well as politicians and the rest of the industry. We understand that.”
Some telecoms firms believe that the government’s plans are not ambitious enough. David Palmer, senior product manager at managed services provider Star, argued that the universal broadband target should be raised above 2Mbps to support the latest web-based services.
“We are seeing a growing trend of UK businesses using cloud computing and on-demand services, and the primary enabler for this is higher bandwidth,” Palmer said.
A spokesman for Broadband Delivery UK, the government body organising the Industry Day, said there were no plans to raise the 2Mbps target. He also indicated that the government was keen to hear about ways that regulations could be changed to aid the industry, as well as suggestions for public subsidies.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010
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