Government outlines broadband plans

Part of the BBC’s licence fee will be used to fund faster broadband services across the UK, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has confirmed.

Laying out the Government’s plans on how to deliver these services, Mr Hunt said the underspend on the digital switchover, which has been calculated at around £250m, will help fund the universal service commitment (USC).

Although he called the minimum 2Mbits/sec speed offered by the USC, first outlined by the Labour Government, “paltry” and “pitifully unambitious”, he said the Government will support it.

“It is a scandal that nearly three million households in this country still cannot access 2Mbits/sec broadband speeds, and less than one per cent of the country is able to access the internet using modern fibre optic technology – compared to an OECD average of around 10 per cent,” he said.

But Mr Hunt also said the BBC’s licence fee can also help support the rollout of superfast broadband.

Although the coalition government wants the development of this next-generation access (NGA) to be market led where possible, Mr Hunt said he realised there ”are significant costs involved.”

Money from the licence fee will be taken from previous plans to fund independent news consortia; this has been calculated at about £250m per year up to 2012.

He said that three market-testing projects will look at ways to bring NGA to rural and hard-to-reach areas.

These will be led by Broadband Delivery UK, a Government agency that sits between the Treasury and Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, which has been set up to deliver the Government’s broadband aims.

However, there are currently no details of what these projects will be.

Antony Walker, chief executive officer of the Broadband Stakeholder’s Group, welcomed the news but warned that the sums of money offered by the Government were small.

“Overall this is positive news. But it’s not going to be easy to deliver these goals. There is an awful lot to think about,” he said.