Super-fast broadband will be available to every home in the UK by 2020, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has promised.
In a speech, Brown called super-fast broadband “the electricity of the digital age” which “must be for all – not just for some”.
At the same time, he pledged to make the British government “the most efficient, open and responsive” in the world, by having a single website created to bring together all government and public sector services.
In his speech, Mr Brown said faster broadband speeds would lead to cheaper and better public services and make trade easier.
But leaving this to the market alone would lead to coverage “determined not by need or by social justice, but by profitability” and “a lasting, pervasive and damaging new digital divide”, he said.
Instead, he said it was up to government to create a fair digital future, adding: “The alternative is our vision: ensuring, not simply hoping for, universal coverage.”
Mr Brown said greater use of the internet would also allow people to have more say over government policy, such as through e-petitions, and could bring major cost savings by making public services more efficient.
Jim Knight, the minister responsible for digital inclusion, told the BBC that the government had to intervene to ensure super-fast broadband reached remote areas of the country.
He told BBC Radio 5Live: “Having universal access to very high bandwidth which allows more streaming video, allows people to watch TV and listen to radio online, it means that we can also release the business and employment potential of this.
“If you just leave it up to the market it’ll only go to into the cities, it won’t get out into rural Cornwall for example without some form of public subsidy.”
The government is planning a 50p-a-month levy on landline telephones to help ensure that rural areas can take advantage of higher broadband speeds.
But the opposition Conservatives have attacked the tax, and said they will force phone line network owner and operator BT to open up its network to competition, and if necessary use cash from the BBC licence fee to fill in gaps in the fast broadband network.