We may be 7th in percentage terms, behind some of the smaller European countries, but according to page 7 of that PDF we're second behind Germany in actual number of broadband lines, and slightly ahead of France.

It is typically arrogant and quite impossible for anyone pushing pens to think to regulate the Internet. ITs Virtualisation makes it impossible. Although we can all see that it is getting very crowded in the lower chambers with all manner of minion wanting to milk IT with rules to channel funding.

Governments and Administrations/Gangs and Cartels would do better to realise that IT Virtualisation is much more a Space Mission Control Discipline than a TeleCommunications one and they need to up their performance quite considerably to even begin to understand what they are up against.... which, as soon as they might, will disappear and reboot as something else that they know nothing about.

In one part of the Internet you have the Neanderthals throwing sticks and stones at each other..... Countries at War with themselves and with others ..... and in another part, the machinery which activates them and pays them to do their dumb things, which have invariably been pre-arranged to keep them busy feathering the Cuckoos Nests. Only the one of them is easily fixed or completely destroyed with a few lines of code injected at the top to trigger AI Clarity.... NEUKlearer Transparency. And IT is a Virtual Force QuITe Immune to Physical Attack and/or Intimidation ....... but if Tilting at Windmills is your bag, so be it. It's your free choice to waste imagination.

As far as I am concerned, the market forces bunch wanted privatised telecoms and as such they should pay for this all themselves. Ofcom is a toothless bunch of w*nkers who already let telecomms companies get away with murder, god knows what will happen with a "regulatory holiday".

BT, Virgin,et al should get off thier fat arses, bring us upto 1st world broadband as they have in South Korea and actually give us value for money, rather than ripping us off at every turn and shipping our calls out to India.

We may have a large percentage of uptake, but what's the actual quality of what we're getting? I've already written to my MP about dodgy practices of my former ISP in putting through an upgrade I agreed to over the phone without ever providing a contract in physical or electronic form. The fact that nearly every provider seems to have a 12-month to 18-month lock-in and there are no regulated minimum connectivity speeds means that most providers are selling 8Mbps but aren't actually required to deliver anything above 512kbps...the carousel of fun with tech support at these places is also quite the treat. Near as I've found Be have the best thing going, but if you're not within distance of an exchange you're out of luck.

Fibre to the curb at a minimum is needed to ensure the bulk of the population can get something approaching reliable service if the government is serious about universal penetration. Personally I think the State should own the infrastructure rather than BT or some other private for-profit entity. The question is whether or not we have the dosh and want to spend it on that.

In the meantime Ofcom could start by ensuring further consumer protection against the blackguards that seem to plague the ISP industry presently.

Until people like Timms stop lying and admit something drastic needs to be done, there will be no real solution.

I hope the EU does get it's way. It's clear that, despite the government in principal wanting to improve things, thanks to OFCOM and BT the chances of it actually happening are slim. The EU will not be afraid of upsetting BT or other big players.

Do you mean "die hard agent of the telcos with a fantastic retirement plan" or perhaps "reject from the RAND corporation who has not yet understood that game theory is ineffective in socio demographic modelling and regulation".

Perhaps if our OFCON spent a little less time telling their buddies in the telco industry "don't worry we'll make this nasty investigation into price fixing of international roaming go away" they might be able to pull their heads out of their sphincters for long enough to do what we, the taxpayers are paying them to do. Of course, one neat solution would be to bar them from accepting any highly paid role at a telco after leaving OFCON quietly by the backdoor as this would remove much of their incentive. I may be old fashioned but in my view civil servants are meant to work for the people who currently pay them.

One also has to ask quite who, in our bought and paid for government, decided that the best head of an industry regulator was a market forces drone? Isn't that a bit like sending Tony Blair to broker peace in the middle east? It would be interesting to discover how many 'Archers' (£2,000 in an unmarked envelope) it took in party donations to secure this appointment.

1999-2002 all over again - BT and Ofcom are dragging their f*cking feet, I think the EU commission is absolutely right and this is scaring the living shit out of the industry! Serves them right, they really screwed up the rolling out of ADSL.

I honestly hope the commissioner breaks the back of OFCOM and then karate chops BT in a million pieces.

at last Europe may Do Something Useful

Ofcom haven't done anything bordering on useful in their entire existence. They have let the incumbent telco get away with passing off an obsolete copper network off as broadband, and the government have believed the job is done. Fibre to the kerb is an absolute minimum if we are to compete in the world economy. Fibre to the home would cost a fiver per house. The Government have their heads in the sand and I hope the commissioner makes them listen to sense instead of the jobsworths they listen to at ofcom and BT.

""Fibre to the home would cost a fiver per house""

Since industry estimates are £15 Billion cost, I guess there must be 3 Billion Homes in the UK.....

Actually since we have in the region of 25 Million homes in the UK, taking FTTx as a consumer-only offering means someone ponying up around £600 per household to install (IF, and that's a big IF, every household fibred-up were to subscribe). If only 60% take up high-speed services, you're talking about £1000 per subscriber.

Those of you who urge the operators to do something: What return on investment are you proposing to give BT/Virgin/AOC on this? Are you prepated to commit to paying them a fair tarrif to both recoup this investment and the cost of running it, say £30 per month on a 2 year contract?

If not - and you want them to immediately unbundle their fibre access to the ISP of your choice for £10 per month - why would you expect them to invest?

What would happen in this scenario.

Ofcom made to tell the wholesale telco provider BT that they have 2 choices.

1 - Start a local loop upgrade program.

2 - Relinquish their telco licence. (if there is such a thing), in other words stop selling telco services in this country and lose their billions of profits easy year.

I think the likely outcome would be BT would moan and groan bit then get on with the investment because they know although in the short term it would hurt they would still in the long term be making billions and billions of profit.

The shareholders will all be thinking there is no business case due to no short term payback but this type of investment is a long term investment and should be viewed as such, they all sitting waiting for a killer application to create the type of demand that would generate a high takeup in a short time its a catch 22 as the killer application cannot exist until the technology is available to utilise it.

fibre is the way to go, the sooner the better. Copper is ok for phones. Real broadband needs fibre, what passes for broadband in this country isn't the real thing at all. Soon people will realise this. If the economics of FTTH isn't a sensible one to recoup investment then either the govt should build and own the infrastructure or they should stop saying we have broadband in this country cos we don't. Certain areas might have it but the vast majority get under a meg, and lots of people can't get even that, there are still many notspots. AQA say 44% of internet users in the uk are affected by their ISP not living up to connection speed claims. 63336.com