Jeremy Hunt announces UK will have Europe's fastest broadband by 2015
In a speech made today at Google’s Campus building in east London culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, announced the UK would have the fastest broadband in Europe by 2015. In his announcement Hunt took time to address the criticisms from the House of Lords made earlier this year which said his plans were too focussed on speed and not coverage, stating: “When the Lords Committee criticised me this summer for being preoccupied with speed, I plead guilty.
“And so should we all.
“Because we simply will not have a competitive broadband network unless we recognise the massive growth in demand for higher and higher speeds. But where their Lordships are wrong is to say my focus is on any particular speed: today’s superfast is tomorrow’s superslow.”
Hunt commented that the government was now looking at ways to invest some of the £300 million television license fee pot into providing high speed broadband for his target of 90 per cent of the country.
Defining high-speed as anything greater than 24 Mbps, Hunt revealed that since May 2010 speeds across the UK have increased by 50 per cent making the UK faster than both France and Germany and that “two thirds of the population are now on packages of more than 10 Mbps, higher than anywhere in Europe except Portugal and perhaps surprisingly Bulgaria”.
In addition OfCom have also stated that for the 4G auctions one of the licenses require indoor coverage for 98 per cent of the population. Meaning high speed wireless will be an alternative to fixed line broadband.
Much of the government’s initial spend will be on increasing a Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) system, which seed high-speed fibre cabling connected to a cabinet near to a user’s home. Internet data then travels through the copper cabling, which is slower, connection speeds via FTTC get slower the further from the cabinet you are.
Due to this issue, Hunt described FTTC as a temporary fix.
"The reason we are backing Fibre To The Cabinet as a potential medium-term solution is simple: The increase in speeds that it allows - 80 Mbps certainly but in certain cases up to 1 gigabit - will comfortably create Europe's biggest and most profitable high-speed broadband market," he said.
"And in doing so we will create the conditions whereby, if fibre to the home is still the best way to get the very highest speeds, private sector companies will invest to provide it."
High speed connections without copper cabling, Fibre to the Home (FTTH) should be available to two-thirds of the country by 2016.