The digital divide -is broadband tax funding the wealthy?

The Commons Business Committee has criticised the government plans to introduce a 50p-per-month tax on households to fund superfast broadband as 'regressive', saying it will result in the poor paying for a service used mainly by the wealthy.

In what will be seen as a rebuff to the method of funding the next generation of internet coonections,the committee said that the charge would have a much greater impact on the less well off who will pay for an enhanced service which only a minority will enjoy.

They added that if public funds are required for next generation access, they should be raised through general taxation, in the same way as for any other national infrastructure programme."

Tory MP Peter Luff joined the debate saying ‘market will determine the roll out of super-fast broadband.’ and urging the government to focus on getting people who are offline online instead.

It's a (fat) pipedream and nothing more.

I engaged in some twitter banter yesterday over the Tories announcement that they plan to deliver "superfast" broadband to the majority of Britain's homes by 2017.

Pie in the sky perhaps,after all 2017 is a long way in the future,the Tories would have to win two elections to bring that promise to fruition and we come to the old arguments about who should pay for it etc etc etc.

George Osborne today set out the party's proposals in an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr Show using what he termed market based solutions meaning that the government will not eb investing in the infrastructure.

As Adrian Slatcher pointed out to me on twitter

remember those wonderful canals & railways mostly built by Irish &Scots labourers, 4 the benefit of the rich

Surely hyper fast broadband is too important to rely on the wims of the private entrpreneur

As Martin Bryant also pointed out to me

t's a (fat) pipedream and nothing more.

I stand by what I also said on twitter,perhaps rather cynically but true

as with many things on the digital/media/creative world lots of talk but when it comes to paying for it........?

I-phone fuels Wi-Fi

The UK is set for a Wi Fi explosion according to this report in the FT this morning.

driven by growing demand from iPhone users and fresh interest in community wi-fi projects.

According to the report

BT, which has 4,000 public hotspots across the UK, said it had seen traffic double in the past year and expected customers to be using close to 1bn minutes of wi-fi on its networks in the year to March 2010.

Times claims broadband costs could treble

This morning's Times reports that it has seen a leaked memo which suggests that two million homes will pay more than three times the broadband levy initially proposed.

The plans, drawn up by Revenue & Customs, show that ministers will tax households with more than one phone line — of which there are more than 1.7 million — for each line they rent, and will also levy VAT on the charge.

says the report adding that

Families with one telephone connection, a separate line for broadband and another for a fax would end up paying £21.15 a year, instead of the originally announced £6. The Finance Bill, to be published early next year, will contain the plans for the 50p a month tax, which ministers hope will raise up to £175 million a year to fund superfast broadband connections for rural areas.

The UK needs to look at lessons in broadband adapation

Lesson for the UK?

Across the Atlantic,The Federal Commission has listed seven obstacles in the road towards universal use of broadband.

In the United States almost two-thirds of adults have broadband connections at home, but of course that's a long way from the country's ultimate goal.

The biggest problem according to the commission,

The Universal Service Fund. The USF was created to directly subsidize phone service for low income people and to support service providers in rural areas. It does all that, but at an exorbitant cost and with increasingly irrelevant results. The United States now spends about $7 billion every year to support this pooch, a result of lousy auditing methods, goofy standards for measuring provider costs, and an intercarrier compensation system that was designed for a pre-IP-telephony world.

However it also identifies

2. The broadband adoption gap.

3. The consumer information gap.

4. The spectrum gap.

5. The deployment gap.

6. The television set-top box innovation gap.

7. The personal data gap.

Take a look at the full article here

Ht-Stephen's Lighthouse

Changing TV habits

Richard Sambrook provides us with,if we didn't know already,evidence of the speed of change in the media.

Hosting a talk given last night by the CEO of TV New Zealand,Rik Ellis,he picked up the following statistic

more people now watch programmes time shifted through broadband than watch through their TV. The online on-demand service was only launched 18 months ago but has already overtaken conventional TV viewing with 30,000 hours a month consumed over broadband

Sky soaring in the broadband market

This mornings FT reports on the good news for Sky's penetration in to the UK broadband market.

Sky has taken the broadband market by storm since it began offering Internet access two years ago. It has signed up 1.6m customers, and become the fifth-largest broadband company.

Furthermore its ambitions are to continue to grow and

Delia Bushell, Sky's director of broadband and telephony, is confident that the company will hit its target of 3m broadband customers by 2010.
Her view is based on Sky's advantage in being able to sell broadband to its 8.9m pay-TV customers.

In a maturing market this is good news for the Murdoch company especially as its rivals Tiscali,Car Ware house and Virgin media are all struggling.

In fact the only thing that could wrong for the Company is related by Diane Morrison over at Paid Content.She sees

The one thing that could hurt BSkyB is if Ofcom’s investigation into the pay-TV market eventually ends up with Sky being forced to make its premium content available at regulated rates to its rivals.