BT’s £1.5million programme to install new fibre optic technology across the country will fail to upgrade the UK beyond a ‘second rate’ broadband provider.
Even if the firm’s new network does connect 10m homes by 2012, the average connection speeds will be still be slower than Japan’s and South Korea’s and only match France’s today.
By 2012, Tokyo, Seoul and Paris will each have invested more money into their broadband infrastructures, suggesting the UK will just keep playing “catch-up” with net speeds.
Such are the warnings from IT researchers at TNS Technology who, in an open letter, said that making the UK’s current net speed five times faster wouldn’t be enough.
“BT’s proposition does have the potential to improve our internet TV services significantly,” TNS wrote in the letter to the FT, “but the UK will remain a second-tier country when it comes to internet speeds.”
Asked about this analysis, BT said it disagreed. The company told FreelanceUK that both consumers and businesses would not get a broadband service that was internationally “inferior”.
“This announcement will not take us ahead of Korea or Japan,” a spokesman conceded, but “over the next few years, it will enable some very high speeds, as high as anywhere else”.
Under BT’s plan, its fibre-based network will mostly provide download speeds of 40 megabits per second, up from the current 8Mbps benchmark, and user average of 4.6Mbps.
But the package has a headline speed of 100 Mbps, to be enabled as early as next month by extending fibre to homes, though only in some areas (starting in Ebbsfleet Valley, Kent).
BT said the network will deliver super-fast broadband to a far larger percentage of the population than in other countries where fibre services are largely confined to major cities.
“In terms of availability, we’re around 99 per cent, making us [the UK] better than any other country in the G8,” the BT spokesman said.
Figures from Gartner show the UK also has a high take-up of broadband – 58 per cent, the same as France, ahead of Germany, the US and Japan, but behind South Korea.
In fact, South Korea is the world leader when considering all stats: the highest penetration rate, 100 per cent availability and more than 4.5m homes on 100Mbps via fibre connections.
The US already has over 6m households with access to these connections, Japan has the most (9.7m subscribers) and France wants 1m by next year. BT is aiming for 10m by 2012.
On average, Britons rely on broadband speeds of 4.6 Mbps, says Ofcom, compared with 21.7 Mbps for users in Finland, where monthly access is about half the price it is in the UK.
“The challenge for the whole [UK] industry is to work out what people are going to do with that speed and find ways to make it interesting enough for people to want to pay for it”, BT said.
BT said it would keep its “demand-led approach” to super-fast broadband: “If people want this, we will build it for them but it has to be economic[ally viable] for us, so they have to want to pay for it.”
Aug 1, 2008
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