The only way the UK can ensure access for all
tohigh-speed
broadbandis to set a deadline, a Japanese
minister has advised.
At an address to the
Department for Business,
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), Kiyooshi Mori,
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, driven by a four-year government
programme to improve access.
"Studies showed that the ICT industry accounts for 40% of real
Japanese GDP," Mori said. "This helped the government realise the
importance of starting a programmme for ubiquitous access with a
deadline."
Mori said the government had also introduced competition
policies to make it easy for new ISPs to enter the market and to
achieve open shared access to networks. As a result, the price of
broadband is 0.07 dollars per 100Kbps compared with the UK's 0.69
dollars.
According to Ofcom research, DSL broadband is available in 99.6%
of the UK. However, the
Communications Management Association has questioned this
figure and the
average speed that 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
economy as a precursor to any action on improving access. The
group's findings will be published later this year.
"There is no evidence to suggest that those countries that have
deployed fibre are in any way better off economically than those
that haven't," said BERR deputy director Mark Swarbrick.
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