Government’s 2012 Broadband Target Unrealistic

In light of the recent pledge made by the government to provide high speed broadband access to every home within the UK by 2012, Point Topic, a leading industry think-tank, has warned this could be an unrealistic target.

Speaking to the BBC, one of Point Topic’s chief analysts, Tim Johnson, said, “The scale of the task is massive and in order to achieve it there needs to be co-operation between government, the regulator and operators such as BT.”

Johnson continues, “Towns such as Basingstoke and Milton Keynes which people might expect to be well connected have “not spots” – areas where residents cannot get broadband services”.

To back up its doubts about the Digital Britain report, Point Topic have also created a map of where serious development and significant changes to the broadband infrastructure would need to be made to provide access to current not spot areas.

The main problem areas are rural locations. BT telephone exchanges do not cover these areas as they are too far away, while cable and fibre based services are also unreachable.

The government’s current plan to cover such areas is to offer mobile broadband and satellite access. However, mobile broadband is not overly reliable and experts such as Alex Salter, claim that mobile broadband is not and never will be as fast as fixed line broadband.

Alex, from the broadband measurement site “SamKnows”, says “There are issues with the network and services drop off when more people use it.”

One thing is for sure, if the government does plan to reach its target by 2012, then major changes in broadband infrastructure do need to be made.