Broadband challenge set out by Ofcom

With more than 1.5 million homes unable to get the speeds that Lord Carter promised in his Digital Britain plan at the moment the full scale of the challenge ahead for the governments hopes of having everyone in the country on broadband by 2012 were set out recently by Ed Richards, the boss of Ofcom.

Richards unveiled research that the regulator would be publishing later in the week, whilst speaking at the The Future of Telecoms at the London School of Economics. Out of the estimated 25 million homes in the UK more than 40 percent currently have no broadband access and, out of these, 55 percent “have decided they do not want it at all, even though they can afford it – we call these the ‘self excluded’” said Richards.

He also said that 30 percent “are restrained by financial resources but would like to be online – we call these the ‘financially excluded’,” while “15% don’t want it and don’t have the resources anyway – we call these the ‘dual excluded’. So, even though people are bombarded by messages about the range of benefits of being online – whether buying cheap insurance or catching up on last week’s soaps – there seems to be millions of people who are not yet persuaded.”

The homes in the UK that want to get broadband but because of where they live they are unable to do so, the supposed ‘geographically excluded’ account for just 1 percent of the population, but only broadband running at 512 Kbps are included in these figures he added.

Access to universal broadband at speeds of 2Mbps or higher by 2012 was what Lord Carter, the Communications Minister, said that he want in his interim Digital Britain report that came out back in January.

Richards said that all those speeds “then the 1% grows substantially to an estimated 15% who simply can’t access a service of this speed at present,” which equates to around 1.5 million households throughout the UK. He said it was “time to ensure that anyone who wants a decent basic broadband service can get one”.

The plugging of the broadband coverage gaps was something that Lord Carter clearly believed involve UK’s mobile phone network playing a key role in, although Richards said that in a number of situations “simple and cheap improvements to in-house wiring can deliver the desired speed improvements”.