Industry weighs options as consumers wait for better broadband

Ofcom is currently consulting with the broadband industry to investigate the best way of changing the UK's telecoms ionfrastructure so it is suitable for very high-bandwidth internet services.

The growing popularity of online video means that more data is downloaded to home PCs every day, the volume of which puts the main BT network and the local networks of copper cables from exchanges to homes under strain.

Making sure that Britain can keep up with its international neighbours is important for businesses and consumers alike. That means new networks connecting homes and business premises to the internet are need, with greater capacity for more data that can be delivered even faster.

Network choices
There are various ways to deliver very-high speed broadband; the most obvious is to run a fibre optic cable to each home; this is also very expensive. Another possibility is to run the high-capacity fibre to small cabinets in each street, with households connected to it by their phone line. This is similar to what the cable company Virgin Media currently does and would lessen the problem of signals degrading when the home is far from the telephone exchange.

Wireless presents another potential solution, with Wimax and 3G (the technology behind mobile broadband) touted as possible answers, especially for areas where cable and DSL are currently hard to come by. But Wimax base stations would still need to have high-caopacity fibre optic cable connecting them to the main BT network.

Civil engineering - mainly the digging required to lay new cables - is a huge part of the cost. Other proposals include building the networks slowly by upgrading the cable ducts buried in the ground each time roadworks are carried out, or by using the existing gas, electricity and even the sewage networks to get high-capacity cabling into homes. New forms of underground duct design could enable companies to upgrade or install new cabling cheaply (in comparison with digging new trenches).

Another possibility is that towns and cities could co-fund the building of new networks with some of the bigger communications companies, such as BT. The problem here is that the more 'islands' of next gebneration broadband there are, the more difficult it becomes for them to interconnect with each other. The result could be what has happened in the Hull area, where the incumbent telecoms company, Kingston Communications, runs the only network available to consumers.

Peter Phillips, Ofcom's head of strategy, said he believed a mixture of all these technologies and more would eventually deliver what the UK needs but was clear that at this time Ofcom would not intervene to instruct companies to build new networks, and nor would government money be invested.