UK Government releases Digital Britain report
The UK Government has published the Digital Britain report today and the main points were outlined in parliament today.
The main parts of the report include:
- Universal access to today’s broadband services by 2012
- Next Generation fund for investment in tomorrow’s broadband services
- Upgraded mobile networks and liberalisation of 3G spectrum
- A three-year National Plan to boost Digital Participation
- Robust legal and regulatory framework to combat Digital Piracy
- Support for public service content partnerships and revised digital remit for Channel 4
- Funding options for national, regional and local news
- Programme of Digital Switchover in Public Services, including upgrading all Radio stations to digital by 2015
"Left to the market, true super-fast broadband will only reach two thirds of homes and businesses in the next decade," claimed Bradshaw. The national fund created by the broadband tax would raise enough money to roll out the next-generation of broadband to the remaining third of the UK's population by 2017, said the report.
The Government will also legislate to stop illegal file-sharing and said it will provide "a framework that encourages the growth of legal markets for downloading that are inexpensive, convenient and easily accessible for consumers." Regulator Ofcom will be tasked with securing "a significant reduction in unlawful file sharing by imposing two specific obligations: notification of unlawful activity and, for repeat-infringers, a court-based process of identity release and civil action."
In order to encourage inexpensive but legal digital content distribution, the report says that the Government will "make some changes to the legislative framework around copyright licensing." The report doesn't really go into a lot of detail on exactly how the copyright laws might be changed though, saying that some issues are National while others are the responsibility of the EU.
The report also confirms the Government's commitment to universal 2Mb/sec broadband by 2012, which will be met via "several elements including simple and complex in-house wiring solutions, deploying fibre to the street for a selected number of cabinets and a wireless solution using either mobile or satellite".
The Government does admit that resolving in-house wiring issues could come at a cost to the consumer, but the industry would be expected to foot the bill for deployment of wired or wireless networks that meet the 2Mb/sec threshold. What the report doesn't say though is how these costs will be shared: "It is not possible to include quantitative information on the expected costs and benefits of these proposals as they may influence the outcome of the subsequent competitive tendering process. These will be published in a final impact assessment which will be produced once this has taken place," said the report.
The Digital Britain report is a massive 245 pages long and if you're interested in reading the whole report you can grab it from the Department of Culture's website.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyTypo, fixed.
Seriously? Ensuring every tiny farm in the highlands of Scotland 50 miles from the nearest exchange has a guranteed 2Mbps is going to take a crazy amount of investment and time. There are some places in the country that don't even get any broadband, let along 2Mbps.
But I'd just love so see them try and stop illegal file-sharing.
;)
Also, who bets that it'll be assumed that P2P=piracy?
So long as it means those of us not in the back end of nowhere start to get modern broadband services - IE: better than the **** we have at the moment, approaching SK speeds preferably.
That's hardly a fair bet :P
We already have systems that can do 8Mbps in our area, but that is worthless when the ISP doesn't have enough network capacity at peak times (i.e. 8am to midnight).
If such a broadband tax is introduced, will this mean the government will start levying demands on ISPs in exchange for access to the fund?
loss in the UK for TV and films of £152m (2007)." thats right, they CLAIM, and we all know how they get these kind of figures, from the notion that a download is the same as a lost sale, yet just 2 points later it states "A recent study in Scandinavia has shown that the biggest users of unlawful peer-to-peer material are also the biggest paid-for consumers of music." ... i'm really disgusted with this section of the report.
On the plus side i do like the idea of upgrading the countires infrastructure, its long over due
So let's get this straight. Privatised telecoms can't be bothered to pay for it, so we'll pay for it.
Then it'll be run, for profit, by privatised telecoms.
There's something wrong here.
Yay, privatisation!
The joke is i am on fibre with virgin and should be getting 2MB/s and three months ago was told the connection was being upped to 10MB/s, none of that has happened and i am lucky to see 1.5MB/s at midnight on new years eve or someother event where everyone else is doing something other than being online.
Now i know my problem lie's with my ISP, but an extra £6 a year isn't gonna fix squat in my view, all the millions of metres of cable to be replaced, all the exchanges to be upgraded, not to mention anything else that needs doing.
I saw his name and switched off, obviously it will never happen, more lies from the gormless unelected dictator nobody in UK wants
Where's that mentioned?
You think by giving the telcos a billion-pound gift of infrastructure at the public expense they're going to immediately become nice?
this may actually happen, as its taking money from us and will not really benefit the majority of UK voting public.
yeah its dressed to look like a good thing, like the terror laws brought in to allow councils to go through your bins, i dont for one min see this as anything but bad for us.
The whole fear in losing net neutrality is based around how web service providers like Yahoo, Microsoft, everyone and customers want faster and more stable internet. Therefore ISPs need to upgrade their whole infrastructure which will cost billions. This is where the fear of losing net neutrality comes from, in that people believe ISPs could turn to prioritised trafficking with companies for extra income and with different websites for different prices making the internet a lot less open, in order to cover the costs of upgrading the broadband network.
If the government subsidise some money into this Fibre Optic initiative it could be one extra self-assurance that ISPs won't be tempted.
Once upon a time BT layed lines, they charged us forever for these lines, we still to do this modern day pay for these lines.....
Then came a day when they wanted us to pay to lay new ones, to make more money.......GREED AGREED......
Northern Ireland:
pop. density: 122/km2
Broadband penetration: 100%
When: 2006
Taxes levied to get to 100%: None
UK
pop. density: 246/km2
Broadband penetration: Broadband penetration in the UK has gone so high that the Office for National Statistics has discontinued its quarterly reporting of broadband growth. Nearly 60% of broadband users in the UK enjoy speeds of 2Mbps or higher.
When: 2009
Taxes proposed to get to 100%: £6 per year
Is maths not taught these days? Do these people have magic money trees? Come on people, get real. Investing in this means money, money has to raised from somewhere. If the telecoms pay for it, they get the money by increasing margin on what they sell. IE the line to existing users. If the government pays for it, who do you think pays the government? We do, via our taxes.
WE PAY FOR IT!! one way or another, if it does happen we will pay for it.
By pushing for the government to fund it you will have a bigger bill to pay. More committees, more admin, more expenses :-). At least with a private company they keep an eye on overheads to maintain profits.
50p Tax isnt a lot.... but before I start paying 1p in extra taxes for this I would want someone to tell me exactly when I can expect my super fibre optic to be installed... as I have a suspicion that I will be paying this tax for the next 10yrs, and my broadband quality will stay exactly the same...whilst all the people in rural england / people who cant afford broadband are subsidised beyond belief.
I also wish Virgin would install their cable in the area where I live so that I have some real choice, rather than paying for adsl + line rental.
http://www.virginmedia.com/myvirginmedia/gofaster/timetable.php
Once a tax is imposed...it is never repealed.
Why do remote villages full of old people need 2mb? most of them dont even know how to turn on a computer.
512K was good enough for me back in the day, I think 512K is good enough for any basic broadband.
Quoted for the truth. As somebody who comes from a rural area i welcome this.
And as for calling 2Mbps "superfast broadband": go to the far East, look at their network speeds and pervasive wireless networks, and tell me what's superfast.
2Mbps shouldn't even be the minimum, let alone the target.
Not quite - some of the multiplexing techniques used to extend the length of telephone lines (i.e. between the exchange and someone's house) make broadband impossible. This is without going into issues of local loop unbundling...
I've never seen a more spurious and hypocritical statement.
Going to cough up a sh*tload to your ISP for all that lovely fibre they laid for you, are you? No, I thought not - I bet you wouldn't pay the costs to set up a satellite or wide-area WiFi connection either.
You mean, like the SK expectation of gb/s connections in what amounts to the near future?
Oh, and 21CN is something different. This is about getting broadband to, well, the middle of sodall. 21CN was about connecting the exchanges together with fibre.
I thought BT's 21CN was to make all but the last mile fibre - i.e. fibre between exchanges and out to local roadside junction boxes?
and if i couldnt get 50mbit would i ask everyone broadband user in the uk to pay £6 so i could get it?
Yes, we pay for it one way or the other.
But better yet, with privatised industry, we get to pay for it one way and the other, and they still get to own it for free.
This counterargument is so fatuous it makes me weep, quite apart from the fact that things that should be services (such as rail and parcel post) obviously work better when nationalised. Services are not run as a profitmaking entity (or rather shouldn't be). Under the proposed scheme we get to give the telcos an absolutely unimaginable amount of money, and they get to make an unimaginable amount of money out of it. This is not what tax is for.
@ Phil Rhodes, you clearly wear rose tinted spectacles if you think nationalised services worked better than privatised ones. They work as poorly as each other. It just replacing incompetents with greedy money grabbers.
BTW do they make digiboxes for radios cos I imagine a lot of people with expensive brushed aluminium analog HiFis are going to be pissed off if they have to replace it for a digital one in 2015.
I'm not agreeing with the "broadband tax" and, as others have already mentioned, 2mbit or even 50mbit shouldn't be the target. What's needed is a complete overhaul of the whole damn system. Our PSTN network is over 50 years old in some places, and we're expecting it to cope with today's broadband speeds? Countries like South Korea have a massive advantage in that their infrastructure is significantly newer than ours - they don't have the expense of overhauling the system.
I don't know what the solution is, but asking the users to pay for the fibre to be laid isn't the answer and neither is asking everyone in the UK to subsidise it. To be honest, even if the government don't levy this explicit monthly charge they'll probably still put together some kind of financial incentive. That money has to come from somewhere, so everyone will be shafted either way; at least this way we know why we're getting shafted and not paying "stealth" taxes elsewhere.
If filesizes keep increasing like they did up to now we will be looking at 1GB drivers by then.
Let us welcome the UK back to the middle age, just without the bonus of at least ruling half the world.