The new government made a public display of scrapping the controversial broadband tax, earmarked for remote rural areas which will now have to wait even longer to be connected.
The government has now attempted to shift the onus onto the operators, calling on them to work more closely together and reiterating plans to force BT to open up its cable ducts.
The government has repeated its rhetoric about the importance of broadband to the U.K.'s recovery, but has once again failed to provide any financial incentive to stimulate roll-out.
The U.K. government has ditched ambitious plans to bring broadband speeds of at least 2 Mbps to the whole country within the next three years, saying there was not sufficient funding to meet the target.
New coalition government Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt pushed back the target to bring universal broadband to the U.K. back to the end of the current government's term in 2015. The new government, which was formed in May, had said they would support the previous Labour administration's plans, but Hunt admitted yesterday that there were not the funding provisions in place to meet the targets.
The government now says it will divert a portion of the BBC's licence fee towards funding network deployments, and repeated its plea to network operators to work together and share access to their infrastructure, or face government intervention.
* A Predictable Funding Failure: As part of its wide-reaching Digital Britain report, initially published in June 2009, the last Labour government proposed to bring broadband speeds of at least 2 Mbps to every home and business in the country. However, the new Conservative/Liberal coalition government recently scrapped part of the Act concerning the broadband tax, which proposed a yearly £6 (US$9.2) levy on all fixed-line connections in the country, to fund the roll-out of infrastructure to remote rural areas where commercial connectivity might not be viable. Culture Secretary Hunt yesterday attempted to blame the previous administration, saying he was "not convinced" that they put sufficient funding in place, avoiding the fact that funding has been removed by his government, with no contingencies made to replace it. The new government made a public display of scrapping the controversial broadband tax, earmarked to connect remote areas—areas which will now have to wait even longer.
* Government Attempts to Push Onus onto Operators: As part of a carefully orchestrated public relations exercise, the culture secretary released a statement just hours before the announcement that the target would not be met, calling on the country's broadband providers to work more closely together and find more innovative low-cost ways to accelerate broadband delivery. The minister also called on telecoms and utility companies to reach commercial agreements to share their infrastructure, reiterating plans to force BT to open up its cable ducts to rival operators. BT immediately countered, telling the BBC that the government target of universal broadband by 2012 could be met without at least £2 billion of public money. Steve Robertson, CEO of Openreach, BT's wholesale division, said that not having broadband makes people feel deprived; adding that the government needed to make up its mind about what is an "essential element of our social fabric". BT currently plans to invest £2.5 billion to bring its fibre-based broadband services to two thirds of homes and businesses in the United Kingdom by 2015, with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) comprising some 25% of the planned roll-out, with fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) making up the other 75%, although other operators are making their own funding commitments.
* Operators Become Further Disillusioned: Although the government cancelled the part of the Digital Economy Bill which would have brought vital funding, it has maintained the controversial "three strikes" Internet law, which will see repeat filesharers disconnected from the Web, without any judicial process. BT and fellow Internet provider TalkTalk have recently announced they plan a legal challenge to this law, which they have previously slammed as unworkable and unenforceable. The U.K. government is set to cash in from an expected mobile spectrum auction next year, and it must come up with some way of committing these funds now if the U.K.'s ambitious broadband targets are to be met. The government has repeated its rhetoric about the importance of broadband to the U.K.'s recovery, but has failed to provide any financial incentive to stimulate roll-out.
