The government has revealed plans to create a universal service commitment for broadband that would see every last one of the UK’s broadband ‘notspots’ filled in. However, it has not yet made a decision about whether it has a role to play in delivering 100 per cent coverage of next generation broadband.
The Digital Britain interim report from minister for communications, technology and broadcasting Lord Stephen Carter, published today, calls for every home in the country to be broadband-enabled by 2012.
According to the EU, four per cent of homes in rural areas of the UK are not within reach of broadband access.
However, only 56 per cent of UK homes had a broadband connection last year, figures from the Office for National Statistics show.
From silicon.com
That’s such a great plan, isn’t it? When broadband will be available to every house, internet sales will grow, search engine users will increase and thanks to all that our web industry (so important to me) will grow again. Can’t expect a sudden boom but slowly I believe that we will get there.
For me the problem with the broadband was always the required BT line and that was always the barrier. You have to pay for a BT engineer to come over to put a line in or whatever and then you’re not even sure how much it’s gonna cost you (AFAIK about £100), then you have to pay a line rental, even if you don’t want to use the phone, just the internet. Then on top of that you have to pay for the broadband monthly. Ah, let’s not forget about the required 12 months contract with BT, another barrier for me.
There was always a solution of using one of wireless dongles from 3, o2 or t-mobile. But then, once again, we get into contracts or deposits (last time I checked with range it was about £90). You also have to watch out how much you download, the limits are silly, the speed is ridiculous but you won’t laugh when your bill comes in if you download even a bit over your limit, I paid £50 once and the bill was showing I was downloading up to 500mb a day, no idea how I did that considering the poor connection and that I was never downloading illegal movies or music on that connection.
To summarize, I believe that government should first decrease the barriers of getting a BT line in houses/flats and improving the quality of these, because what’s the point of having a mother of all broadband when your line is old and limits your speed?