Superfast broadband will be available in 90% of UK by 2015, says Ed Vaizey
Author: Hélène Mulholland and Juliette Garside, The Guardian |
The culture minister Ed Vaizey has said 90% of the country will have superfast broadband by 2015.
The minister insisted the government was working to put the right infrastructure in place for “the vast majority of the country” by 2015 to “future-proof” the service.
Those who want “really, really fast speed” would then be able to connect to a network and choose to upgrade, he said.
Vaizey made his comments as a report by the House of Lords warned that the government’s broadband policy had become “preoccupied” with delivering certain speeds to consumers when what was needed was a greater focus on access through a national broadband network.
The Lords communications committee concluded after a wide-ranging, six-month investigation that Britain would need a better broadband network to cope with future technologies. It raised concerns about the way Britain’s network was being built, describing government strategy as “flawed” and liable to widen the digital divide between those communities with fast internet access and those living in broadband blackspots.
The peers said broadband should be treated as a vital national asset, like roads, rail and energy.
The report, Broadband for All – an Alternative Vision, recommends national planning for a “communications network of local, regional, national and internet exchanges where different operators can site equipment and exchange traffic, all linked by ample optical fibre that is open to use by competing providers”.
“The delivery of certain speeds should not be the guiding principle; what is important is the long-term assurance that as new internet applications emerge, everyone will be able to benefit, from inhabitants of inner cities to the remotest areas of the UK,” it says.
The Conservative Lord Inglewood, chair of the communications committee, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “The current strategy is based around providing certain levels of speed across the country and we’re not convinced at all that that is the right place to start thinking about a policy and a programme for rolling out broadband infrastructure.”
He added: “What we need to do is to find a system, it seems to us, that enables people to get what they want and pay accordingly.”
Vaizey said the UK was one of the most “digital nations in the world”, with a thriving e-commerce economy in which people spent more online and used technology more.
He said there was a “very competitive marketplace” in Britain in terms of laying fibre optics in people’s homes in two-thirds of the country, with “government intervention” needed in the rest.
Vaizey told Today that £500m had been put in place to support this, with funding from devolved governments bringing the total to around £1.2bn, plus additional funding for pockets of cities where broadband connection was poor.
“We have set ourselves a target that by 2015, 90% of the country will have superfast broadband,” said Vaizey. “Generally speaking most people define that around the 35 megabits a second (Mbps) speed but we have said that 100% of the country should have access to 2Mbps. To put that in context, for example, if you want to watch the iPlayer on your computer you would need about 1-1.5Mbps.”
He said he was “happy” the target would be met.
The highest speed broadband requires fibre optics in the home, but Vaizey said further improvements to broadband speed must be “demand-led”.
Pressed on the fact that some European countries had faster connection, Vaizey said: “I think the rest of Europe actually looks to us as leaders in this. That also includes price because there’s absolutely no point in having superfast broadband coming past your door if you can’t afford it. So we also want competition on price and we do have very low prices on broadband.”