By: MarkJ - 12 March, 2010 (8:41 AM) - Score: 2011 - Fixed Line Broadband

The Conservative Party has just published its new 'Technology Manifesto' (.PDF), which reiterates everything that Tory Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, told the BBC One Andrew Marr Show last month (here). It includes a commitment to deliver "100Mbps broadband across most of the population" by 2017 but still does not clarify what "most" actually means.

It also makes the claim that "this is up to 50 times faster than Labour’s planned broadband network," which appears to compare their 100Mbps plans with the government’s 2Mbps USC. However as we all know by now, the 2Mbps USC is completely separate from Labour's target of reaching 90% of the country with a "next generation broadband" network by 2017. On the other hand Labour has not defined a specific speed for this.


To summarise; the Conservative's will force BT and possibly its competitors to open up their underground cable ducts, allowing rivals to install their own fibre optic cable without having to dig up extra roads. Nothing new with this either, they’ve said it a few times now.

Regulation on fibre optic will also be relaxed, although there's still no specific position on whether or not they will reduce the controversial Fibre Tax. Furthermore they will also use part of the BBC’s TV Licence fee (3.5% - the 'Digital Switchover' budget) to help fund the rollout of 100Mbps into rural areas.



By contrast Labour has two schemes. The first sets aside £250m and aims to make minimum broadband speeds of 2Mbps available to everybody in the country by 2012 (USC). The second proposes to put a new 50p +vat per month tax on all fixed phone lines in the country, earning £175m per year. This would fund the rollout of Next Generation Access (NGA) networks to 90% of the country by 2017.

A recent survey of ISPreview readers (here) showed that the 50p tax solution was hugely unpopular, with just 11.7% of respondents believing it to be the best way forward. 32% favoured the conservative plan to use part of the BBC's TV Licence fee, 24% wanted the Fibre Tax to be cut and a further 24% felt that private investment alone was the best fix.

It’s clear that more people appear to be behind the Conservative plan than the Labour alternative, although we’d still like to see more specifics and clarity on the ideas being put forward above, especially with regards to the Fibre Tax. It would be interesting to know where the Liberal Democrat party stands in all this but to date they have not responded.

On the bright side, at least both of the main government candidates actually have a position of NGA. That's a marked improvement from the last election when neither appeared to care about broadband.