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Culture Secretary Says UK Needs Broadband as Good as South Korea

Monday, Sep 29th, 2014 (1:41 pm) - Score 937

The Government’s Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Sajid Javid, has today told the annual Conservative Party Conference that having better broadband Internet connectivity than the largest EU states is “never enough” and he wants the United Kingdom to “compete with the likes of Japan and South Korea“, where ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH/P) networks are common.

At present the current coalition Government is working to ensure that 95% of the population can access a fixed line “superfast broadband” (24Mbps+) connection by 2017 (mostly via BT’s assistance), with the expectation being that additional funding to help cover the final 5% could be confirmed before the end of this year (here).

So far progress has been good, not to mention affordable (important given the on-going climate of austerity), but not everybody is happy with BT’s choice of a hybrid fibre and copper line technology (FTTC). This is due to a number of reasons, not least with regards to its variable performance over distance.

Activists attending last week’s Labour Party Conference also fired a warning shot across the Government’s bow by calling for “nationwide access to 1Gbps broadband in homes, businesses and public buildings, with 10Gbps services for tech-clusters, as early as possible in the next parliament” (here). Crucially this is not yet official Labour policy, despite what the BBC may have suggested in its related reporting. Indeed many have questioned the practical feasibility and costs of doing this within the given 2020 timescale.

Perhaps coming as a response to all this Sajid Javid ended up telling today’s conference that he at least has an aspiration to go much further by putting the UK alongside the likes of South Korea and Japan, where state-funded deployments of true Gigabit (1000Mbps+) capable pure fibre optic networks are much more common.

Sajid Javid, UK Culture Secretary, said:

Our ambitious broadband programme is reaching every corner of our country. We know that the internet superhighway is every bit as important as our motorways and our railways.

So we’re investing almost £1 billion of central Government money to take superfast broadband to 95 per cent of the country by 2017.

Since 2010, access to Superfast Broadband has doubled and we already have the best broadband coverage of any major European nation.

But beating France and Germany is never enough. We need to compete with the likes of Japan and South Korea. So yes, we’re making progress, but there’s still more to do.”

On top of that Mr Javid also referenced the on-going Mobile Infrastructure Project (MIP) by saying the Government were working hard at “improving mobile phone coverage, especially in rural areas“, before admitting that there are still “vast swathes of our countryside where you can’t get a decent phone signal” and adding that’s “just not good enough“.

Mr Javid has so far also tried and failed to encourage Mobile Network Operators (MNO) to tackle the remaining gaps in coverage through a controversial National Network Roaming proposal (here). Unsurprisingly Javid then ended his comments on this aspect by saying that “our mobile operators must do more“.

So what are we to make of all this? In absence of any actual substance or firm commitments, beyond what already exists, then we’d say not a lot. It’s the usual pre-2015 General Election political spin, which we’ve come to expect from all the main parties and as ever you should always take anything politicians say with a big pinch of salt. We’re unlikely to get a real idea until the parties publish their official election manifestos next year and even then that pinch of salt may still come in handy.

Meanwhile we can’t escape the feeling that politicians may be eyeing BT’s recent G.fast developments with interest (here), perhaps spying another opportunity to gain some extra political capital by promising the theoretical capability of 1000Mbps. But in reality G.fast would struggle to make such performance available, although 200-400Mbps might be more plausible and would still be very impressive if it can be delivered to the vast majority.

In any case it’s sometimes easy to forget that, not so long ago, the chances of a Government or its rivals even so much as talking about improving the United Kingdom’s broadband and mobile infrastructure seemed about as likely to happen as HG Wells style time-travel. How things have changed and we should at least be grateful for that and the improvements that have already been made, although bigger commitments are always welcome.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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