The UK government must set a deadline for ensuring
ubiquitous access to high-speed broadband if anyplan to improve access is to succeed,
a Japanese minisiter has advised.
At an address to the Department for Business, Enterprise and
Regulatory Reform, Kiyooshi Mori, the Japanese vice-minister for
communications policy, said that Japan had already rolled out
100Mbps fibre broadband to 85% of households.
Japan expects ubiquitous access for businesses and consumers to
high-speed broadband by 2010 - the result of a four-year government
programme designed to improve access.
"Studies showed that the ICT industry accounts for 40% of real
Japanese GDP. This helped the government realise the importance of
starting a programmme for ubiquitous access with a deadline."
Mori said the government also introduced competition policies to
make it easy for new ISPs to enter the market and for open, shared
access to networks. As a result, the price of broadband per
100kbit/s is 0.07 dollars compared with the UK where it is 0.69
dollars.
According to Ofcom research, DSL broadband availability covers
99.6% of the UK, although the Communications Management Association
has questioned this figure and the average speed users actually
get.
"Although we think of cable modem and DSL services as "high
speed" today, they are
too slow to support networking of applications envisaged for
the future such as high-definition IPTV," said Ovum analyst Matthew
Howlett.
The UK government has set up Broadband Stakeholder Group to
investigate the link between broadband and the UK economomy as a
precursor to taking any action on improving access. Its findings
will be published later in the year.
"There is
no evidence to suggest that those countries that have deployed
fibre are in any way better off economically than those that have
not," said Mark Swarbrick, deputy director at BERR.