Budget broadband promise too slow?

Updated on 22 April 2009

By Benjamin Cohen

The government guarantees faster broadband in the budget but is it really fast enough?

Technology minister Lord Carter already promised in his interim Digital Britain report that he was aiming for a universal service obligation for broadband by 2012.

He promised that 1.5m homes where broadband is either not available or too slow would finally be connected to the internet superhighway. But Lord Carter promised speeds of "up to 2 Mb/s".

At the time critics, including me, pointed out that promising an "up to" figure was meaningless as it gave no indication as to the floor of the acceptable speeds.

Well today, the Budget cleared this up saying that every home would have speeds of at least 2 Mb/s no later than 2012, the costs being met in part by the £250m surplus funds left over for the BBC's Digital Switchover Help Scheme, that helps elderly or disabled people switch to digital tv.

So license fee money will go to the broadband industry in order to connect homes in rural areas that have been left behind by the digital revolution.

The Budget says this will "allow virtually everyone to experience the benefits of broadband, including the increasing delivery of public services online".

Aside from question marks over the true cost of cabling up rural areas or using mobile services to plug the gaps, the commitment really does prompt a "so what?"

So everyone will be guaranteed speeds of at least 2 Mb/s. Not that great an achievement considering the average download speed is already more than double that at 4.3 Mb/s.

But by 2012 BT will be offering download speeds of around 40 Mb/s to half of the country, as will Virgin Media. The later may potentially be able to offer speeds of 100 Mb/s - speeds already being reached in Korea for example.

But let's just work on the basis of 40 Mb/s being a realistic speed for half of Britain in three years time. That's 20 times the speeds the Chancellor promised this afternoon.

So while many of us will be able to watch multiple high definition tv programmes via our internet connections while at the same time downloading whole albums in a couple of seconds, others will be only be able to manage Youtube or the low resolution BBC iPlayer.

If that's not a new digital divide, I don't know what is.

To be fair, the government is considering how it can support the development of super-fast or next-generation broadband, particularly in the half of the country that BT and Virgin Media will not cover. And the Budget does reveal perhaps how this will be achieved. It approved a £100m project to deploy next-generation broadband in South Yorkshire.

It could cost anything between £5 and £30bn to roll out next-generation broadband to the whole country, so it will hardly come cheap.

When I met Lord Carter last week, I asked him if the British government would follow the example of the Australian government who have announced a £21bn investment programme for their broadband system.

He told me: "We're in a very different place from Australia. It's a huge country - 35 per cent of the Australian population live in rural areas so their infrastructure needs are very different from ours. They would not be offended with me saying that our network infrastructure starts in a stronger place.

"Nevertheless, we have issues about coverage and next-generation capability. And the Australian government have made a very bold move; we will show our position in the next couple of months."

(Tucked into paragraph 4.42 is another hint, the government is actively considering how it could tempt communication companies into investing if they give away valuable radio spectrum.)

Watch this space, we've been told that this will all be resolved immediately after June's European and local government elections.

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