Why Broadband Britain still has a long way to go

Eighteen months ago, when we launched the Computing Broadband Britain campaign, we were living in a different world.

The briefing document being published by the specially-convened government advisors the Broadband Stakeholders Group, was in danger of being buried by a Department of Trade and Industry paying little more than lip service to the reality of high-speed communications.

Business and consumers alike were yet to be convinced that broadband was worth the effort - anything more than dial-up connectivity was expensive, concentrated almost solely in urban areas and tended to be the preserve of the techie few.

And the supplier community was bickering and finger-pointing over the fiasco of local loop unbundling to make much genuine progress.

Though local loop unbundling remains something of a non-starter, and there are still rumblings of discontent about the question of monopolistic behaviour by BT and slow progress in rural areas, there has nonetheless been real and genuine progress.

Take-up now stands at more than 2 million and is growing at a rate among the fastest in Europe. The Prime Minister has put his money where his mouth is and agreed to fund the roll out of broadband to all schools by 2006.

The House of Commons' Environment, Food and Rural Affairs committee has conducted a series of investigations into high-speed access in rural areas.

The DTI's demand aggregation strategy is at last starting to take shape, whipped into action by the prospective purchase of a national broadband network for the NHS.

And on the consumer side, prices are at a level which, while not as low as we might like, are at least within the bounds of possibility.

But let's not be complacent.

Public sector demand has not yet actually been aggregated. Thorny questions about content provision, intellectual property and the digital divide are only just starting to come into their own. And availability is still an issue.

The UK may be adding connections as fast as our European rivals. But they had a headstart and Broadband Britain, despite local initiatives, rural trigger levels and the sterling work of councils and regional development agencies, is still not anywhere near a reality.

We have finally made it to the road, now we just have to keep on walking.