The government's e-commerce minister has admitted that the
UK has "made a slow start with broadband communications'' compared
with other countries.But Stephen Timms told a special debate in the
Commons on the issue that now "we are making rapid progress''.
Timms confessed that in 1987, when working in
the IT industry, he had written an article predicting there would
be 600,000 broadband connections in the UK by 2000.
"In fact it took longer than that: 600,000
was reached by the time of my appointment to my present position a
year ago this month," he admitted.
"From 1987 it took until last October to
reach one million broadband connections, but it will have taken
only nine months to add the second million, which I expect us to
achieve in the course of this month.
"Today there are more than 1.9 million
connections - one million via cable modems and 900,000 via ADSL -
and the number is increasing by well over 30,000 a week, which is
one of the fastest rates of growth anywhere."
Independent research has identified the UK as
having the second-largest broadband network after Germany, said
Timms.
The minister said more than 70% of households
can access one of the mass-market broadband services, with BT
planning to take ADSL coverage to 90% of UK households shortly.
However, he admitted there were problems of
access in some rural areas.
While satellite broadband was available, it
was expensive so the government was trying to aggregate public
sector demand to make it commercially viable for commercial
providers to extend broadband services to rural communities.
Timms' shadow minister, Andrew Robathan,
admitted: "The situation is improving, so I do not knock the
government.''
Liberal Democrat spokesman Vincent Cable
expressed concern about the growing division between young people
who used IT and broadband and older people who did not.