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Despite a recent cabinet reshuffle and the news that the leader of the report Lord Stephen Carter is stepping down, the Digital Britain report is still due out tomorrow, and will outline the government plans for broadband across a range of subjects including piracy, online access and quality of services.
We’ve been talking about various possible outcomes in the report for months now, so here’s a quick rundown of everything we’re expecting to see.
· Universal Service Obligation – At the head of the report is the plan to adopt a Universal Service Obligation (USO), similar to the service obligation on normal telephone lines. The report has adopted a 2 Mpbs minimum speed for all UK households regardless of location, which aims to fill a substantial gap in the digital ‘not spots’ which are found across the country, especially in rural areas. Worries are that an over reliance on 3G speeds will see this already bare minimum USO dropped to speeds of under 1 Mbps.
· Quality of Service – The actually definition of a quality service hasn’t been openly discussed, so we’ll hopefully see some ground rules on exactly what constitutes a 2 Mbps connection in terms of technical support, price and contention. Latency is also an issue as it affects services like online gaming and Skype a great deal. Upstream bandwidth (the speed at which users can transfer information from their computer to the net) has been completely ignored by the report so far.
· Piracy - We’ve heard a great deal of information about new government tactics to stop piracy, especially as the trade union and entertainment industries continue to pressure the government into taking action. Disconnection from the internet as a punishment for copyright infringement now seems unlikely, although other possible solutions could involve having your internet or applications slowed down to the point where piracy is impractical rather than impossible. How the government intend to get around technology like encryption and VPS services is unknown.
· Payment – Taxpayers are expected to pay for the large majority of the services, with money hinted at being brought in from the Digital TV Switchover fund and even the BBC licence fee. The report was estimated recently at a cost of £1.2bn, although this figure will change with any change to the USO.
As more and more news has come out about the report, it’s begun to seem less and less spectacular in its nature. Far from being the pathway to the future of high speed broadband in the UK, the report is looking at simply making some form of internet access available to everyone. Real issues like the quality of the service, speed of the upload and overall price for consumers are unknown as of yet.
As parts of Britain struggle for 2 Mbps speeds, Virgin Media is continuing to roll out their 50 Mbps service and BT is already planning a 40 Mbps service over copper lines to be commercially available by 2010, 2 years before the scheduled completion of the points in the report.
We’ll be covering the Digital Britain report when it’s released and taking a look at how it will affect UK internet users in the future.
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