UK culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has said the government is exploring ways of using public funding to guarantee superfast broadband access in rural areas. In an interview with the Financial Times, he said that three such pilot projects have been…
UK culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has said the government is exploring ways of using public funding to guarantee superfast broadband access in rural areas. In an interview with the Financial Times, he said that three such pilot projects have been established in case BT and Virgin Media fail to provide truly national coverage.
While applauding BT’s recently announced plans to cover two-thirds of homes with optical fibre by 2015, he appeared to urge the operator’s rivals to lay their own superfast networks.
Some of the incumbent’s competitors are “teetering on the brink” of rolling out their own fibre infrastructure, he said, rather than planning to buy broadband wholesale from BT.
It is unclear whether companies such as Sky and TalkTalk, which is owned by handset retailer Carphone Warehouse, would wish to invest in building their own networks.
Hunt has recently outlined his belief that part of the licence fees TV owners pay to state-owned media company BBC should be used to fund the rollout of superfast broadband, with a view to ensuring that the UK has Europe’s fastest network by 2015.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph reported that Martha Lane Fox, the founder of UK online travel site Lastminute.com has seen her Labour-led ‘digital champion’ role expanded under the coalition government. In this position, she will be responsible for exploring ways of boosting internet access for remote areas and examining which public sector transactions could be carried out online.
