Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, has repeated his vision for the UK to have the speediest broadband across Europe, despite heavy criticism from other voices.
Hunt reiterated his intention to bring broadband greater than 24 Mbps to more than nine tenths of the country by 2016. His comments came after a Lords Committee advising the UK’s schedule for broadband delivery is too fixated on speed.
Speaking at the Google Campus in the Silicon Roundabout area of London, Hunt said the speeds were vital to remain competitive in an ever increasing digital marketplace:
“We simply will not have a competitive broadband network unless we recognise the massive growth in demand for higher and higher speeds…”
Business owners, online marketers and SEO professionals and consumers are all agreed that faster connections will be good. However, it is still unclear exactly how these will be achieved.
The first step is likely to be through a ‘Fibre To The Cabinet’ system, which carries higher speeds to a certain point, before delivering the data the final leg of the journey through existing cabling.
Hunt says this is only temporary though, before ‘Fibre To the Home’, replacing the copper cabling, can be delivered to two-thirds of the country by 2016.
Labour has said the plan lacks details and coherency though, with shadow culture minister Helen Goodman saying:
“He (Hunt) boldly declared that Britain will have the fastest broadband network in Europe but then offered no plan as to how he will make this happen.”
Despite party politics being played though, business leaders will just hope that faster and more accessible broadband is delivered as fast as possible.
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