Ofcom gets ball rolling on superfast broadband

Ofcom has launched a public consultation to garner views on what it calls 'next generation access networks', or 'superfast broadband', as it is becoming known. BT has said that it will begin rolling out ADSL2+ -- which will provide "up to 24 Mbps" broadband depending on the distance the house is from the telephone exchange -- from the beginning of next year, and that only the remotest parts of the country won’t be able to use ADSL2+ by the end of the decade. But super-fast broadband is the next step on after that, with speeds of 50 - 100 Mbps -- and superfast broadband normally refers to 100 Mbps only.

Superfast broadband is already a big hit in Japan and South Korea, where consumers are migrating en masse from ADSL to using fibre, and 30 million and 10 million households respectively are predicted to have fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) 100 Mbps connections by the end of this decade. US telecoms giant Verizon is also aiming to spend $23bn rolling out FTTH by 2010, and some European countries have started rolling fibre out as well. So unless the UK begins to roll it out soon we could find ourselves lagging behind most of the rest of the developed world in terms of superfast broadband access.

Applications such as HDTV and online gaming are expected to drive demand for superfast broadband, as well as much faster downloading speeds in general, and ISPs are expected to offer it as part of a triple play or quad-play, which consists of the ISP providing TV, broadband and phone -- plus mobile for quad-play.