Posts Tagged ‘high-speed broadband’

Darling pushes ahead with phone tax to pay for superfast broadband

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

The UK Government’s annual Budget, announced on March 24, confirmed its commitment to levying an annual tax on phone landlines to pay for the extension of super-fast broadband services to 90 per cent of the country by 2017.

Chancellor Alistair Darling reiterated the government’s commitment to making Britain a digital world leader, with plans for a major broadband roll-out.

He announced that super-fast broadband would be available in 90 per cent of homes by 2017, funded by a £6 annual tax on landline phones.

The Conservatives have vowed to scrap the tax if they win the next election, which is expected to be held in May.

Fast internet services would create “hundreds of thousands” of new jobs while putting services online will help efforts to reduce public spending, the chancellor said.

He also promised more tax breaks for the UK’s computer games industry.

“The UK has the potential to be a digital world leader. It needs high-speed broadband for rural areas as well as urban, it must not be limited to the well-off,” the chancellor said in his budget speech.

The broadband tax has cause fierce debate. The current plan will see people with fixed lines being charged 50p a month to help fund super-fast broadband, although it is not clear whether those who use cable services will be included.

It has been called unfair by an all-party group of MPs who say that most people who pay it won’t see any of the benefits.

It is aimed at the so-called ‘final third’ of the country, where commercial operators’ plans to roll out expensive fibre-optic services are likely to be considered too expensive.

Some experts were surprised that the chancellor did not reiterate Gordon Brown’s commitment to bring super-fast broadband to 100% of the UK by 2020.

“We are disappointed that the budget has simply repeated the government’s previous target of 90 per cent coverage by 2017,” Sebastien Lahtinen, co-founder of broadband site ThinkBroadband, told the BBC.

In the same week as Mr Darling’s announcements, Prime Minister Gordon Brown talked up the Government’s digital commitments when he described high-speed web access as “the electricity of the digital age”.

And as the date of a poll nears, broadband is emerging as a major issue, with some key differences between the parties.

The Conservatives have said that the funds which they would not receive as a result of scrapping the planned phone levy would be made up instead by private businesses who would stand to gain the most from superfast broadband’s introduction.

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Prime Minister promises high-speed broadband in all UK homes by 2020

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

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.

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Government confident no extra funding needed to bring superfast broadband to 70% of UK population

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

More than two-thirds of Britain could easily get the ability to use high-speed broadband network speeds without any extra government funding, a report compiled by the UK Government’s Business Innovation and Skills Committee believes.

The Committee goes as far as to call the possibility of the Government intervening to ensure that its target of having high-speed broadband available to 70 per cent of the country by 2017 “unwise”.

Its reasons for reaching this conclusion were that it could lead to a distortion in the business phone and broadband market, and not allow time for any technological solutions devised in the meantime to be tested sufficiently to allow them to play a part in extending the reach of high-speed broadband services across the country.

The committee has also voiced the opinion that there is little evidence of pent-up demand for this enhanced service, and that customers are currently unwilling to pay a price premium to access such high-speed services.

Instead, it believes that the UK government should switch its attention to encouraging outside bodies and commercial interests to invest in next-generation access (NGA) capability. The MPs on the committee said they believed this could best be achieved by means of alterations to the regulatory and tax systems.

Findings of a report commissioned by the Government itself into its proposals compared the likely levels of coverage which would be achieved if it went ahead with plans to levy a 50p per month ‘broadband tax’ on each UK home, against what would be achievable by the markets if they were left to fund the improvement themselves.

It wanted to know the likely outcomes in the latter scenario in the event of the funding from the levy not being available, or take-up of the scheme not reaching projected levels. In either of these cases, the shortfall in the funding available would have to be met by commercial sources.

The MPs on the committee concluded that this would be likely to happen as businesses increasingly realised that having high-speed 8mb or 24mb broadband capability, or faster, was in their competitive interest.

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Campaigners gather to press for high-speed broadband services to rural areas

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

The UK government looks likely to come under increasing pressure to offer better business phone and broadband services to rural areas.

A new pressure group has been formed to persuade the government to make sure that it delivers on its promise to make high-speed business broadband services available universally by 2017.

Included in the group Final Third First is a number of broadband service providers. They have joined rural lobby groups to press for high-speed broadband to be made available to the ‘final third’ of the UK – the most remote areas which require the highest levels of investment to achieve the objective.

Launching the campaign on the Final Third First blog, Country Land and Business Association Head of Rural Business Development Dr Charles Trotman said: “The government’s universal service commitment to provide broadband speeds of two megabits per second (Mbps) for all by 2012 will be hard to achieve.
 
 ”Those living in areas known as the Final Third still receive no proper access to broadband, putting them at a severe disadvantage. This campaign calls for faster action on the progress already made so that everyone can benefit from the Government’s increasing array of online services.”

Of course, this includes many businesses which would welcome the opportunity to access better quality broadband connections, as it would help make their dealings with Government at all levels, and hence the running of their affairs, that much easier.

There are mixed views on whether the priority should be the achievement of super high-speed broadband connectivity of up to 100Mb, or ensuring that a minimum standard of 2Mb is available universally.

Lloyd Fenton, founder of a self-help online portal for rural businesses, www.ruralbroadband.com, nevertheless says that the ‘Final Third First’ campaign would “add significant weight to efforts to connect rural communities, many of which rightly claim to be more in need of better broadband than their urban counterparts”.

Glenn Peacey, of Hampshire County Council, said: “Rural broadband is a key part of ensuring the long term economic and social viability of rural communities.  Access to the internet enables rural communities to compete on an equal footing with urban centres. It enables smarter working from home which reduces dormitory villages, increases spending in local shops and reduces CO2 emissions and road congestion. 
 
“High speed broadband also has a significant impact on social sustainability. Not only does it enable residents to access leisure and media services which they would otherwise be excluded from or have to travel to consume, it also facilitates access to online education and learning resources.”

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Strong growth helps Virgin Media beat forecasts

Friday, February 26th, 2010

Virgin Media is promising to offer its customers the fastest commercially available broadband network in the UK by the end of 2010.

It announced plans to roll out a 100Mb broadband service across parts of the UK in February as it gave its financial results for the previous quarter which were ahead of expectations.

Its revenue for the last three months of 2009 was GBP980million, boosted by it signing up an additional 28,600 subscribers for its cable service.

The company’s success is based on the high proportion of its customers – over 60 per cent – who are signed up for at least three of its offerings from pay-TV, broadband, and fixed and mobile telephone services. More than one in 10 of the total takes all four.

Cable customers are also contributing more to the group’s revenue, with income from these up 5.8 per cent over the quarter. These yields are set to grow further, as the company implements a series of price rises across its products in the coming months.

But Virgin Media chief executive Neil Berkett told Reuters that while the group was succeeding in upselling to its existing customers, it was attracting new subscribers at the same time.

And he believed the roll-out of its superfast broadband would see this migration take a further step forward.

“The launch of Virgin Media’s 100Mb service will be a historic moment and will mean the UK will be comparable to other leading broadband nations,” he said.

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BT superfast broadband to kick start price war

Monday, February 15th, 2010

BT's announcement that it was to unwrap a super-fast 40 megabit per second service for less than £20 a month was expected to herald a new price war among broadband suppliers in the UK.
Mid-February 2010 saw the first time that customers in the UK could choose between two super-fast broadband providers after BT announced it had laid enough fibre-optic cables under the street to start its 40Mb a second service.
Until then, Virgin was the only company to own fibre optic wires under the streets of Britain, taking advantage of this to offer a 50Mb a second service. About half the country’s population live close enough to a Virgin cable to be able to use the service, according to Broadbandgenie.co.uk.
Downloading a 12-track music album from a service such as iTunes takes three minutes on an 8Mb service, but just 36 seconds down a fibre optic connection.
Next week just a few hundred thousand customers will be able to be hooked up, in parts of Cardiff, Muswell Hill in London and Glasgow to BT’s fibre optic cables. But by the end of the month most of Manchester, north London, Basingstoke, Watford and Halifax will have the service.
BT’s cheapest deal at the super-fast speed of 40Mb a second is just £19.99 a month, £8 cheaper than the 50Mb a second service from Virgin.
Michael Phillips at price comparison site Broadband Choices said: “This is great news for customers that you have two major, big competitors fighting for customers.
Virgin said that it not only offered faster speed but it was also more generous with its “fair usage” policy. So far none of its estimated 40,000 customers on its super-fast service had ever stepped over its “unlimited” level.
BT, in contrast, said that customers on its £20 a month service have a 20GB monthly limit, the equivalent of watching the BBC iPlayer programmes for an hour and a half every day. On the more expensive package of £25 a month, consumers could download “unlimited” amounts of data – which meant up to 100GB a month.
Gavin Patterson, chief executive officer of BT Retail, said: “The internet is essential to our customers’ lives and they are demanding more and more as richer and even more compelling services become available.”

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