Posted: 17th Oct, 2009 By: MarkJ

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.
Report Recommendations
The Government should implement its commitment by holding a publicly funded European procurement on a five-year programme for the completion of 100% fixed broadband coverage in the UK with an initial minimum downstream bit rate of, in our opinion, 4Mbits/sec (rather than the 2Mbits/sec suggested so far) and minimum upstream bit rate of 1Mbit/sec. This should be technology neutral other than for a requirement for low latency.
As part of the competition evaluation, extra benefit should be given to bidders who give contractual commitments for upgrade paths to at least 10Mbits/sec downstream over the five-year life of the programme and to progressively lower latency and contention ratios. Bidders should be required to set tariffs comparable to those set nationally, (for example, no rural premium charge).
The winning bid would be that which committed to the required performance and quality targets at the minimum level of public subsidy. The target would be for that subsidy to be for five years only with the business case self-sustaining from that point.
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.