BT to pump £1.5B into broadband
BT announced plans to spend £1.5billion in upgrading the UK's broadband infrastructure and bring fibre optic connections to 40% of UK homes, about 10 million households.
I laud this plan. Fibre to every home should be the aim for a developed country's communications infrastructure. Knowing Brits they will complain about it reaching 'only' 40% of households by 2012, but they need to start somewhere, and the current network is old and creaky and so big one can't possibly rework all of it.
Right now the only provider with widespread fibre links in UK is NTL branded as Virgin Media but with little of the Virgin brand's emphasis on good customer service. Competition in distance-resilient high-speed broadband is very welcome indeed.
BT's caveat is that Ofcom provide it a friendly regulatory environment to make this investment worthwhile. I guess this means it should be allowed a temporary monopoly on the infrastructure to allow it to recoup its costs, which I can agree with as long as it isn't too long. Opening it up right away to all competing operators would be unfair to BT, unless these other operators also contribute to the infrastructure costs, or BT is allowed to charge them appropriately.
Of course this is not so good for the consumer, but if the alternative in the long run is being stuck with aged copper connections, it may be worth it. We can have our cake and eat it, only let us allow the cake to bake first.
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