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Well, do we want a faster Internet or don’t we?

An interesting week – we’ve had conflicting views in the new about whether the UK needs broadband to be faster than it already is.

Stephen Timms, the competitiveness minister, has met with broadband operators to discuss upping the speed of broadband connections around the UK. The fear is that the UK will become uncompetitive if our broadband network isn’t world-class – and cheap.

The UK does lag behind other major economies in terms of broadband speed – countries such as Japan, France, Korea and Sweden all have 20mbps broadband as standard. In the UK, we’re seeing advertising for 20mbps broadband only matched by customer complaints that in the real world these speeds are far from what’s achieved.

Bizarrely, both Ofcom and BT have ‘expressed doubts’ that the time is right for rolling out higher speed fibre optic networks – where speeds of up to 100mbps are possible. Well, surely Ofcom’s role is not to be holding back technology – and BT has a vested interest in getting maximum revenue from the current infrastructure before implementing a new one.

It doesn’t take people with very long memories to recall how far behind the UK was at getting broadband in place nationwide – for several years, if you weren’t sat on top of a local exchange, in a city centre, you were out of luck. We really don’t want that same situation again.