I recently attended the Westminster eForum on Building 21st Century Broadband. A very well attended forum with industry and government all interested in how and when the UK can deliver a super fast broadband network.

I went expecting a broad range of opinions and the diverse attendance list did not disappoint. I listened with interest to people’s views on the targets for delivering a base level of 2Mbps to all UK users. Initially it was decided that this was the target for 2012, which is a fair target for 2 years time. However, the target date for this is now 2015 but with no increase to the minimum 2Mbps.

As a provider of broadband to businesses, our customers will always select the fastest service they can get. 24Mbps broadband if it’s available; if not they’ll go for 8Mbps; failing that, they will reluctantly settle for 2Mbps. In five years time, no business is going to accept the 2Mbps option. 40Mbps and 100Mbps broadband are now emerging and this is what the business community is already starting to request.

The move to Cloud Computing is gathering pace and will only drive demand for more and more bandwidth.  Application content is getting richer and people are working remotely often from home, where broadband is the only viable connectivity option.  2Mbps may be sufficient today but before long, working efficiently and productively on a 2Mbps connection will become near impossible.

In contrast, in Australia they are proposing 100Mbps to 90% of their population by 2018. If this goes ahead this will make the UK proposal look exceedingly un-ambitious and may put us at an economic disadvantage.  Should we be at least aiming for 10Mbps?

It is worth noting that 2Mbps is the base-level for 2015. A lot of these users may still have this level of service in 10 years’ time; by which time almost all online content will be built around an expectation of 40-100Mbps. We need to build a UK-wide network that is sustainable for the next 50 years otherwise money spent now will be wasted and in ten years time we will be going through the whole exercise again.