At an address to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), Kiyooshi Mori, Japanese vice-minister for communications policy, said that Japan had already rolled out 100Mbps fibre broadband to 85% of households.

"Studies showed that the ICT industry accounts for 40% of real Japanese GDP," Mori said. "This helped the government realise the importance of starting a programmme for ubiquitous access with a deadline."

Mori said the government had also introduced competition policies to make it easy for new ISPs to enter the market and to achieve open shared access to networks. As a result, the price of broadband is 0.07 dollars per 100Kbps compared with the UK's 0.69 dollars.