Who pays to 'put broadband in every home by 2012'?
Updated on 29 January 2009
Wired up and online ,every home in Britain is to get broadband internet access by 2012, the government promised today.
The Digital Britain report also called for everyone had fast enough access to watch videos online.
The Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the new digital economy would create thousands of jobs and help lift Britain out of recession.
But it's not clear who'll bear the cost of this giant project.
Channel 4 News went to the village of Bronwydd Arms in Wales to meet those who fall into the digital divide: a town without broadband, mobile phone reception or freeview.
Rolling out new fast broadband is as "important as building railways was in the 19th century".Gordon Brown
The station for Bronwydd Arms doesn't run a regular service any more and the steam trains here are little more than a museum piece.
But the residents believe that the town's telecoms infrastructure is as out dated as a coal powered train and it is just one of scores of communities left behind by the digital revolution.
You wouldn't think that even a horse trainer like Alison Thorpe is affected by the lack of broadband.
Broadband doesn't work here because unlike the majority of the country they have aluminium phone lines which are incompatible and for years BT have said that replacing them would be uneconomical.
BT is obliged to offer a land line telephone service to every property in Britain, but the obligation does not extend to broadband, it only has to offer slower dial up connections, no faster than they were in 1995.
Mark Owen, owner of White Water Consultancy, said that his kayak wholesale business is loosing money because he can't use broadband.
And a normal teenager would be spending time researching homework online or maybe chatting to friends on Facebook or Bebo, not so for Bronwydd resident, 15-year-old Emily Thomas.
In Bronwydd there is not just a lack of broadband, there is no mobile phone reception and freeview doesn't work either.
It is an area the Welsh assembly has called a "notspot".
The assembly is paying half the costs of rewiring everyone and the model adopted here is likely to be used in other "notspots" across the rest of the UK.
The prime minister says that rolling out new super fast broadband is as "important as building railways was in the 19th century".
But at a cost of anything from £5 to £30bn, it won't be cheap.
