It is good to see the government making some small additional funding available for certain flavours of broadband in this year’s Budget (Budget 2012: 10 cities to get ultra-fast broadband). But is it really putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to broadband rollout?

We are £1.1bn short of reaching “superfast” broadband for the UK, let alone “ultra-fast”. What’s more, the government expects telecommunications providers to bridge this £1.1bn funding gap. This half-hearted approach to funding broadband infrastructure will not make us competitive in Europe, let alone the rest of the world.

Convergys and the London School of Economics have launched a study that indicates how the universal availability and widespread use of high-speed broadband services will be fundamental to the future international competitiveness and social cohesion of the UK. However, despite the benefits, the government is not investing enough.

In a tough economic climate, it’s unjustifiable to expect UK telecommunications providers to invest £1.1bn to meet the government’s commitments. Indeed, it betrays the government’s serious lack of understanding of the revenue potential from broadband in the UK.

Against the backdrop of the £200bn being invested in energy and transport infrastructure, funding from all public sources for broadband up to 2015 is likely to be smaller than government revenue from the digital dividend spectrum auction. It’s time the government started investing for the future.

Morag Lucey, Convergys

We in local government spend a small fortune in content checking for emails and the web (Digital Economy Act Q&A: Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock).

It suits the ISPs not to get involved. The more rubbish out there, the bigger pipes we need for the information to come down.

For email, we throw about two-thirds away at the edge before it hits the internal networks. ISPs could stop a huge proportion of this getting on the internet in the first place, on the first hop.

We all have to do our bit to police the internet. Even individuals at home have to fork out money to protect their own computers, so why shouldn’t the ISPs?
Anthony Kew

It looks as if the government will not intervene or stop ISPs managing network traffic (Tim Berners-Lee pushes net neutrality at ISP roundtable).

This is a positive outcome as ISPs have had to change the way the traffic moves across our networks to match our changing patterns of internet consumption.

Net neutrality would mean a flat internet where all traffic is treated equally and this was once a perfectly valid viewpoint. Internet usage today has, though, evolved dramatically from what it once was.

The internet cannot be 2D when we are now living in a 3D world. The internet was designed to deal with email and basic web browsing, but now we have services that desperately need their traffic sped up so they can be used at their full potential.

Certain services, where even a tiny delay would result in an almost intolerable experience, would benefit consumers greatly if they were prioritised. Imagine trying to watch a video on YouTube that takes an age to stream, or taking a call on Skype where each speaker was delayed by two seconds.

ISPs need to keep using smart traffic management if they are to deliver a decent internet experience and this means allowing them to – transparently, and with user input – accelerate certain traffic.

Matthew Simms, Rocket Communications

Although net neutrality will always attract discussions regarding Big Brother and backhand deals (Does the internet need traffic cops?), it is always worth thinking through the other arguments for traffic prioritisation.

When the internet was first created, most data traffic was related to email and web browsing, both of which were – and remain – delay tolerant. Today, we have video content to stream, voice conversations, billions of pounds worth of e-commerce traffic, not to mention financial systems that require micro- if not nano-second responses. For this reason, having a completely neutral internet is rather like allowing pedestrians and bicycles on the M25, and enforcing a 30mph speed limit at all times.

We need to acknowledge that the internet has changed, and with it, the best way of handling its traffic. We already have software engineers and architects – we may well also need internet traffic wardens.
The data tsunami that now threatens to overwhelm service providers to the degradation of quality of service for end users means the concept of net neutrality needs a rethink. 

Owen Cole, F5 Networks