Lord Carter’s Digital Britain Report set out the objective of bringing 2 Mb/sec broadband to all in the UK by 2012. This universal service commitment is a good thing, but falls far short of the much more ambitious broadband infrastructure plans in other economies. The UK plans are predicated on the continued dominance of DSL broadband supplemented by private investment in fibre optic broadband from most notably Virgin Media and BT.
The Australian government has a manifesto commitment for a far more ambitious broadband future. They had committed to bringing fibre to the cabinet broadband (FTTC) to 90% of the Aussie population using $4.7bn of public funding. Incredibly this plan has been shelved in favour of a much larger A$43bn investment in bringing fibre to the home (FTTH) ultra-fast broadband to 90% of homes. The remaining 10% will be catered for by wireless mobile broadband and satellite broadband.
This matches the dominant broadband infrastructuire in Japan which already enjoys average residential broadband speeds of over 90 Mb/sec versus 3.6 Mb/sec in the UK.
The Aussie government intend for the broadband investment to be a public-private partnership, with the government would be the majority stakeholder in the project.
The amount of money involved is vast and it is not clear what the pay back would be, but it certainly sends a clear message that the Australian government feels that an ultra-fast fibre-optic broadband network in the 21 century is as important to the economy as a rail network was in the 19th century. The UK won the rail race back in the 19th century, but is far, far behind in the 21st century broadband infrastructural race.