Universal broadband in the UK will be reliant on mobile operators

In order to deliver Lord Carters recent commitment to provide 2Mbps broadband connections to every home in the UK by 2012 the government will be turning to mobile operators.

The specifics of the functioning of a new Universal Service Commitment appear to be limited in the recently published Interim Digital Britain report, and decisions on the detail have been deferred. It says “We will develop detailed proposals for the design and operation of a new, more broadly-based scheme to fund the Universal Service Commitment for the fully digital age – including who should contribute and its governance and accountability structures.”

The idea of roads in the remote and rural areas being dug up to lay fibre cabling is clearly not going to happen, although the USC will be “delivered by a mixture of fixed and mobile, wired and wireless means”.

The proposals for the USC will be published in more detail in the summer when the final Digital Britain report is issued. Once the new USC is in place the old one, which guarantees a voice service to everyone in the country and applies only to BT and K-Com, will be dropped.

Carter said in a recent briefing to industry and journalists “At the moment… a guaranteed 2Mbit/s wireless broadband connection is pretty tricky to do. But by 2012 we might be in a different place so we’re setting an ambition, that’s all we’re saying. Let’s put something out there as a marker.”

Describing the new USC as “an aspiration to a floor of up to 2Mbit/s” Carter confused many of those attending the briefing. He then went on to compare it to the water industry and the applicable minimum standards of quality, but “with a kind of plus or minus”.

He said “If you took the most remote household in the furthest part of the United Kingdom it might cost you £100m to provide that person with 2Mbit/s guaranteed; that wouldn’t be an economically rational thing to do. So where you’re stating this as a government document what you have to do is give yourself a little bit of wiggle room.” Before making his “wiggle room” recommendation Carter said that he considered various options, although reports that 2Mbps should be the hard minimum speed were in an earlier draft of the report.