Britain’s broadband networks are lagging behind most European neighbours including Bulgaria and Latvia in terms of quality, a study said today.
The report, by IT giant Cisco, ranked the UK’s systems 31st out of 66 countries and found they were currently ‘meeting needs for today’.
But they were well behind technologically-advanced Japan and South Korea, whose broadband systems are already rated ‘ready for tomorrow’.
Cisco, which looked at broadband speeds as well as penetration, said Britain’s facilities would improve through the looming upgrades of cable networks.
Joanne Hughes, from Cisco, said: ‘It can be a bit misleading to look at the rankings.
‘The important thing is whether the broadband quality of a country is good enough for today’s needs and the UK falls well within this category.
‘We forecast the UK will improve because of things such as cable networks being upgraded and the Digital Britain report focussing on next-generation access.’
Japan and South Korea have been leading a drive for access to super-fast broadband services.
The South Korean government recently promised universal speeds of up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second) by 2012.
They joined countries including Sweden, Bulgaria, Latvia, Holland and Denmark in having ‘ready for tomorrow’-rated broadband networks, which enables users to watch applications like high definition video.
In Europe, Sweden was found to have the best rolled-out access, with users outside the most populated cities enjoying better quality than those in the cities.
Communities that are keen to obtain fibre-based broadband are being asked to publicly declare their desire for high-speed net access.
BT will log responses to a website to get a better idea of the potential demand for fibre-based services.
The telecoms firm said the results would influence its future plans on where it deploys the technology.
BT said it would commit to wire up the five exchanges showing the highest demand for fibre.
It said this could mean that commercially viable exchanges would be the first to get the fibre-based service or that exchanges thought to be non-viable would be added to its deployment plans.
The survey, dubbed The Race to Infinity, will start early this month and run until the end of the year.
BT has set up a website through which individuals and communities can express their desire to have their area fibred up.
The site will host a leader board showing which exchanges are gathering the most votes.
BT is committed to putting £2.5bn into next-generation broadband; the target is to extend its reach to 70% of homes in the UK. Fibre will be connected to these homes with different technologies.
Some will get fibre direct to their home (known as FTTH) but others will have the cables connected to a street cabinet (FTTC) and the last few metres will be over old-fashioned copper cables.
Andrew Ferguson, editor of broadband news site ThinkBroadband, said the scheme had superficial similarities to a campaign BT carried out when broadband was initially being rolled out.
“While that campaign saw thousands of exchanges enabled, the current aim for this survey is to enable five exchange areas for FTTC by 2012 at the latest,” he said.
Campaigners involved in the first BT broadband survey were starting to re-emerge and get involved all over again, said Mr Ferguson.
He pointed out that although The Race to Infinity was a BT Retail campaign, other internet service providers were not banned from taking part and could table their own suggestions for exchanges to be connected up.
The UK’s culture secretary has been talking tough on broadband in his first major speech on the issue.
Jeremy Hunt said that the previous government’s commitment to a “paltry 2Mbps” (megabits per second) universal net speed was “pitifullly unambitious”.
He added that it was “a scandal” that nearly three million households cannot access even this speed.
He said that his goal was to provide Britain with the “best superfast broadband network in Europe”.
Details on how this would be achieved were scant but could include new regulation to force water, gas and electricity companies to open up their ducts.
“The biggest cost involved in rolling out new fibre optic networks is digging up the roads,” he said.
“Cut these costs and, straight away, investing in superfast broadband becomes a substantially more attractive proposition,” he added.
He welcomed Ofcom’s proposals to open up access to BT’s ducts and telegraph poles.
Mr Hunt acknowledged that fast, reliable broadband is “increasingly essential”.
He said that a national superfast network could add £18bn to the GDP and create at least 60,000 new jobs.
The BBC licence fee could be used to part-fund the roll-out of superfast broadband across the UK.
Details of the plan were outlined in the coalition deal struck between the Tories and the Lib Dems.
Ed Vaizey, who has been appointed as the new broadband minister, will oversee the roll-out.
The BBC said it looked forward to discussing the proposal with the government.
A new broadband minister could be appointed “later this week”, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has told BBC News.
It follows calls for the new coalition government to hurry up and appoint such a minister.
Malcolm Corbett, chief executive of the independent network co-operative said it was vital to get broadband policy back on track “as quickly as possible”.
Culture minister Ed Vaizey has been rumoured as a possible candidate.
“We need to appoint a minister as quicky as possible. Without it UK broadband risks drifting and that is not a good thing for UK competitiveness,” said Mr Corbett, who heads up Inca (the independent networks co-operative association).
“Ed Vaizey would be a good bet as he is on top of the issues,” he added.
BT has announced that it will expand its roll-out of next-generation broadband to bring super-fast services to two-thirds of the UK.
Originally its fibre services, offering speeds of up to 40 megabits per second (Mbps), were due to reach around 40% of the population by 2012.
A £1bn investment will see the project roll out to a further 20% of the population by 2015.
The first four million people will be connected by the end of the year.
“It’s an exciting situation,” said Liv Garfield of the firm.
The firm has also announced a deal with the Onlive video games service to offer streaming games to BT Vision customers.
“You’ll have many games from many different providers and you’ll be able to play them wherever you are,” said Ms Garfield.
Gordon Brown has said Labour plans to give every home in the UK access to super-fast broadband.
In a speech, the prime minister called high-speed web access “the electricity of the digital age” which “must be for all – not just for some”.
The Conservatives say they have made a similar pledge and have attacked a £6-a-year landline levy planned by Labour.
The PM also promised to create a single website bringing together all government and public sector services.
The “mygov” portal will allow people to manage pensions and benefits, pay council tax, apply for school places and jobs, and book doctor’s appointments – all online.
He said it would end the “one size fits all” style of public services and would help the British government become “the most efficient, open and responsive” in the world.
The PM also said Labour planned £30m of funding for a new Institute of Web Science, to be based in Britain and jointly headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web.
Virgin Media has thrown down the gauntlet to its broadband rivals, vowing to roll out a 100Mb service across the UK by the end of 2011.
It said this would give customers the fastest available commercial product in the UK – at more than 20 times the average speed.
The group claimed the service will allow web surfers to download a music album in as little as five seconds, an hour-long TV show in 31 seconds and an high definition movie in less than eight minutes.
Virgin is also expanding its 200Mb pilot as part of the push to become a “broadband nation”.
The news came as the group far exceeded its financial forecasts in the fourth quarter, adding thousands of new cable users and extracting more money from each subscriber.
A government proposal to charge people with fixed phone lines 50p per month to help fund ultra-fast broadband has been condemned as “unfair” by MPs.
The cross-party Business Innovation and Skills Committee said most of those who would pay the tax would not benefit from the faster broadband service.
The focus should be on providing basic broadband for all and allowing markets to deliver higher speeds, it said.
The government said the plan was the “best way to drive further investment”.
It maintains that faster speeds are “vital to the UK’s growth”.
However, the committee argued: “We believe that a 50p levy placed on fixed telecommunication lines is an ill-directed charge.
“It will place a disproportionate cost on a majority who will not, or are unable to, reap the benefits of that charge.”
Market forces
The government’s broadband plans – outlined in its Digital Economy Bill – have two main strands.
It wants to ensure a minimum speed of 2Mbps to all parts of Britain by 2012, and then deliver ultra-fast broadband to most of the country by 2017.
The committee agreed that the government should help deliver 2Mbps to all by 2012 but said that it was “concerned” that the government had not defined what it guaranteed.
An extra one and a half million homes will benefit from super-fast broadband by 2012, BT has said.
Originally the telecoms firm said that it could only deploy so-called Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) to a million homes because of its cost.
But it now believes 2.5 million homes can benefit because it will be cheaper to provide than it had first thought.
A further 9 million homes will receive the slower Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) technology by 2012.
Previously BT had said that it could only lay FTTP to new-build sites – with the Ebbsfleet development in Kent is its flagship site – but now it has found a way to make it more widely available.
It will use existing ducts and overhead cables to bring fibre to brownfield sites as well.
Potential sites will be identified by a variety of factors, including geography of the region and the topology of the network.
Homes eligible for the FTTP technology will receive speeds of up to 100Mbps (megabits per second). This compares to a top speed of 40Mbps for FTTC technology.
(BBC)