If The Conservatives win the General Election they have pledged to deliver 100Mb fibre broadband across Britain by 2017.
Having just launched their “Technology Manifesto” it says that:
“We will be the first country in Europe to extend superfast 100 mbs broadband across most of the population. This is up to 50 times faster than Labour’s planned broadband network – and will open up new opportunities for the next generation of British high tech companies, and put Britain at an advantage when it comes to developing innovative online platforms and services.”
The wording above is a bit mis-leasding as they are comparing the minimum 2Mb Universal broadband that Labour have and not Labours aim of having 90% of the UK covered with Next Generation fibre broadband by 2017, which will be in part funded by the controversial 50p per month “broadband tax” that will be applied to every landline in the UK.
They would also hold BT to it’s word on requiring them to open up their ducts for other companies to lay their own fibre in them to houses where it is available and in return part of the BBC License fees would be used by BT to help deliver high speed broadband to more rural areas where the cost would be too high otherwise for BT to make it a commercially viable option.
The manifesto also read:
“Our plans will give Britain the fastest high speed broadband network in Europe, helping to create 600,000 additional jobs. We will make the British government the most technology-friendly in the world, and meet our ambition that the next generation of Googles, Microsofts and Facebooks are British companies”
It is good to see that with this election that technology and in-particularly high speed broadband is quite an important factor to it which we hope will result in the investment that is needed to make sure that Britain does rise up the ranks of high speed broadband nations instead of falling behind other advancing nations.
The General Election is widely anticipated to be on May 6th.