The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) has recommended that the UK government increase its commitment to deliver a minimum UK broadband download speed of 2Mbps to everybody by 2012 (USC) to 4Mbps. It added that the service should also be "affordable", "reliable", have low latency and include a minimum upload speed of 1Mbps.

The proposal was made in the RAE's 'ICT for the UKs Future' (.PDF Download) report, which looks at the implications of the changing nature of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), and goes much further than the governments limited focus on download speed.


We fully support the RAE's proposal as it almost exactly mirrors our own outlook for what the governments Universal Service Commitment (USC) should have been. However we suspect that a minimum upload speed requirement of 1Mbps would be too difficult to achieve. Even some of the fastest land-line broadband services still struggle to deliver barely 0.5Mbps.

The frustration is that these recommendations are not new and formed a part of the RAE's original March 2009 submission to the then preliminary Digital Britain report. They were obviously ignored and we are therefore unlikely to see a sudden u-turn on the final proposals.