Recent letters and articles in PCW about limited or non-existent broadband services prompt me to consider how we ever arrived at a situation where virtually every house in the UK has access to a telephone line.

Obviously the answer is that commercial considerations were not part of the equation - the GPO was a public service utility that could not choose to ignore areas that were more costly to connect to the network than others.

This public service utility has been turned into a monopoly that serves its shareholders first and the public second, therefore I feel that the government has a duty to protect its citizens who live in areas that BT considers uneconomic to reach.

Is it too much to expect that if BT wants to continue to profit from its monopoly in supplying broadband services, both resale and wholesale, it must be forced to supply a minimum level of connectivity for every household?

A simple rule stating that there must never be an order of magnitude difference in Mbits/sec between the slowest and fastest service available to any subscriber would suffice to put even the most remote areas on the broadband map now and keep them updated as technology progresses. Unless this happens, I fear there will be some areas that will never be connected – ever.

Ralph Bartlett

Posted by on March 19, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)