Today’s superfast broadband will be tomorrow’s superslow broadband, declared the UK’s culture secretary Jeremy Hunt responsible for TV, speaking recently to the UK’s Royal Television Society in Cambridge. As a result, the UK government was keen to move quickly beyond the current target of giving everyone broadband access at 2 Mb/s or more, and upgrade this to a much more ambitious 100 Mb/s. This can only be attained through massive fiber deployment and bringing it to within short distances of a few hundred meters at most from every subscriber.
The government intends to achieve this by speeding up the process of giving third party access to the network of poles and ducts controlled by BT, the incumbent Telco.
At the same time, Hunt expressed disappointment at the UK’s inability to establish a mobile TV service, and urged mobile operators to get their act together and establish a faster 4G network capable of delivery high-definition video.
Hunt also promised measures to tackle copyright infringement and protect children against unsuitable content.
