By Mark Andrews – Guest blogger for AVE Services
The UK’s culture secretary has announced today that more than a million UK homes and business have access to “superfast broadband speeds”.
The EU defines superfast broadband as 24Mbps or above, the UK intends to meet this target for 95% of the UK by 2017, ensuring that the rest have a speed of at least 2Mbps.
But the Federation of Small Businesses have criticised the target as “simply not ambitious enough”.
While Sajid Javid, Conservative culture secretary celebrates that the effort is “firmly on track” to meet this target, it is important to put these ‘achievements’ in contrast on a global scale.
Finland plans to deliver a baseline of 100Mbps to its citizens by next year. South Korea intends to see the majority of its citizens on 1Gbps by 2017. And a Japanese ISP announced earlier this year that it can offer broadband packages with 2Gbps download speeds to residents of Tokyo and six surrounding districts.
Though there have been efforts in the last through years by BT, Hyperoptic & Gigler UK to increase the prevalence of 1gbps download speeds, the operations on a national scale have evolved much more slowly. The hard truth is that the UK Government’s plans will not keep our internet speeds competitive on a global scale.
BDUK, the group set up to spend £530m of Government money to ensure that rural areas of the UK get adequate broadband, has awarded every contract to BT – meaning that BT has a fixed monopoly on rural broadband development.
If we compare this philosophy to France, where intense competition between ISPs has led moderately priced ADSL, VDSL2 and FTTX speeds of up to 1gbit/s for €29,90 a month – we begin to see just how backwards the UK’s Government’s thinking on the development is.
Meanwhile in the UK, schemes like B4RN (Broadband for the Rural North), which offers up to 1Gbps to 350 homes have come under the threat of closure since BT signed contacts with councils around the UK. Numerous schemes that provide a similar service to B4RN have had the plug pulled in recent years.
In a digital, global economy – internet speeds matter. The ability to traffic data, whether it be between devices on a single network or between companies across countries is the lifeblood of modern companies. Faster speeds also make opportunities possible. Imagine what a video platform such as YouTube would have been like on the speeds of 20 years ago? What innovations are being held back because of poor internet capabilities now?