Analyst says digital divide could be here for some time to come

Following the recent proposals for universal broadband made in the final release of the Digital Britain report it is believed by some analysts that the latest measures will do nothing to change the two-tiered broadband that is currently available in the UK.

Among the proposals made by the Digital Britain report it announced that it would continue to work towards universal broadband access of at least 2Mbps by 2012 and that it would raise funding for a next-generation broadband network by placing a £6 annual tax on fixed phone line services.

It was also proposed in the report that £200 million out of the BBC’s licence fee to help to move the universal broadband plans forward, although there are currently questions as to whether this will go ahead.

These new measures, however, would not help in removing the digital divide that is becoming increasingly common throughout Britain according to researchers who said that the figures that have been release recently by the Government don’t seem to add up.

With approximately 34 million fixed lines running through the UK analysts calculated that a few hundred million would be raised by this tax each year, which would be way off the budget of £1.5 billion that BT has announced to lay high-speed fibre optic cabling by 2012 to under half of the homes in the UK.

The opinion of many analysts is that even with all these plans proposed in the final Digital Britain report, the next few years will continue to see consumers in the UK being forced to use a two-tiered broadband system.

All this may mean that the Government may need to look at private investment in order to speed up the implementation of next generation technology that will include fibre broadband, mobile broadband and even satellitebroadband to achieve its universal high-speed broadband goals.