BT says existing network could deliver 93% broadband coverage

BT Broadband has told Ministers it can put high-speed broadband within reach of ninety-three per cent of the UK population just by making inexpensive modifications to its current network. The firm’s currently in talks with Lord Carter ahead of the final Digital Britain report being published later this month.

The provision of 2Mbit/s broadband for all by 2012 is one of the headline ambitions of the interim Digital Britain report, which was published in January. Communications regulator OfCom has warned that as much as fifteen per cent of the British population won’t be able to get connections of that ilk, mainly due to how far their homes are from their nearest exchanges and the dreaded imperfections of copper wiring.

So what about the solution BT has conjured up? To quote The Simpsons, “There’s no trick to it, it’s just a simple trick.” The broadband giant says that during testing it’s accomplished 2Mbit/s connections over a distance of 17km from an exchange – that’s twice the distance over which a Digital British standard broadband can currently be sustained – by fitting homes with a second phone line. Then the remaining seven per cent of the population can get their high-speed fix thanks to satellite broadband, just like magic.

BT are warning Carter and co. that utilising the country’s existing five mobile phone networks to expand broadband availability could only be a stopgap measure and would harm competition. (It presumably would also leave BT Broadband’s corporate parent the BT Group feeling that it hadn’t been invited to the ball after it gave up its stake in the mobile market through the demerger that created O2 many moons ago.) The plan, which was announced in May, involved augmenting the spectrum these networks currently control by selling them access to the frequencies freed up by terminating the analogue television signal.

His Lordship had set his number two, the improbably named Kip Meek, the task of cutting a deal with the five networks in order to achieve his broadband benchmark. However, the fact that O2 and Vodafone can use the swathes of the spectrum they control for broadband right now – well before the analogue apocalypse occurs – has limited progress on what may have seemed a Meek agenda.

But one man’s stumbling block could be BT’s stepping stone. “Investment needs to be directed towards the most efficient solution and away from giving the mobile operators an unjustified subsidy,” a company insider told The Guardian. “The fixed line network not only provides the best solution, it is also open to all operators on an equal basis thereby fostering competition rather than strangling it.” And we all know BT’s always been so good when it comes to “fostering competition.”

Further details at [The Guardian]

Tags: ADSL2+, BT, Carter, Digital Britain, Meek, OFCOM