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70% of UK 'to receive high-speed broadband without public funding'

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Posted 9th March 2010 at 10:56am by Ewan Taylor-Gibson

Broadband Coverage

The private sector-led roll-out of next-generation broadband will equip 70 per cent of the population with high speed services, even without any public funding.

This is the major finding from a new government study, conducted by Analysys Mason Group, into the potential impact of public sector intervention in the broadband market.

Under existing government plans, a 50p-a-month broadband tax is to be introduced in order to fund 90 per cent high-speed broadband coverage in the UK by 2017.

However, the new report indicates that the controversial levy will help provide faster web services to just 20 per cent more households nationwide.

Last week, the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee claimed that the government should abandon its plans to directly participate in the development of the national broadband infrastructure.

"Early government intervention runs a significant risk of distorting the market and will not allow time for technological solutions to extend the market’s reach across the country," the MPs claimed.

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  • Techtotaller, 10th March 2010.

    Keep faith in the market and the market will deliver. And who even knows how many of that extra 20 per cent want or need fast broadband?

    Reply

  • Paul, 15th March 2010.

    Interesting: I live down a short lane (about 100 yards), at the end is a cluster of houses (about 10). I received a letter for Virgin Media saying "Fibre Broadband to your home" - sounded good so I made some enquiries.

    "Yes we can go up to 200 metres from the cabinet" (we are about 150 metres). However, to make it more interesting for us we would like some more subscribers - so I went to the trouble of contacting all the neighbours and got five immediately available.

    OK looks promising AND more importantly it avoided any existing infrastructure. I then went to the trouble of finding the best route to avoid existing infrastucture. This was actually really easy

    So the guy comes round and says that it looks do-able and that Virgin have a reserve of funds for such installations - so got escalated ...

    Completely out of the blue I find some has already been and done a survey and rejected the job - because they only do installs of less than TEN Metres .... which is rather stupid in the extreme if they can do runs of 200 metres. Can someone explain this to me?

    It seems especially silly given that about 30% of the population live in similar situations (around where I live 90% of the population are down short lanes like mine.

    So does this mean that the Government will never reach its targets of >> 90%? I guess not!!!!

    Reply

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