Never mind the digital divide between those that have broadband and those that don't. New research from Point-Topic highlights the growing divide between those with broadband and those on something even faster (fibre etc.).

Europe, which is usually one of the top continents for faster Internet access technology, is about to be downgraded and overtaken:


The research makes for some pretty dire reading and lends an additional degree of credibility to a recent report from the 'Broadband Stakeholders Group' (here), which echoed a similar fear of falling behind.

Content (IPTV) and other value-added (VoIP etc.) services are believed to be among the key driving forces for adoption of faster broadband, something existing technology may have a hard time keeping pace with:


There are a number of big investment plans to upgrade various European operator networks, such as BT's 21CN. Unfortunately many of these do not factor in fibre and ADSL2+ technology alone will not be enough to keep up, especially when many will never achieve speeds even remotely close to the headline figure.