UK Digital Infrastructure fund to usher in ‘gold standard’ Fibre Broadband

The broadband situation here in the UK has been criticised for some time, with many ISPs relying on the Open Reach infrastructure to deliver fairly low internet speeds at times. Now, it looks like the UK government wants to spur some competition, as it will be providing £400 million to spur emerging network providers to ramp up the delivery of fibre broadband and gigabit speeds to more homes.

The government's new scheme is targeting emerging network providers specifically and wants to speed up the roll-out of FTTP (Fibre to the Premises) and rely less on FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet). This will allow for much faster speeds in many homes.

Right now, Virgin Media is one of the few mainstream ISPs in the UK to offer ultra-fast broadband with top speeds of 200 Mbps, more than double Sky and BT, which offer a top speed of 76Mbps to most customers, with the exception of York where Sky offer a limited Gigabit trial to a small number of properties.

With the UK's Digital Infrastructure Investment fund, the hope is that gigabit speeds will be achievable at more homes as right now, this is only available at two percent of premises in the UK.

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KitGuru Says: With Open Reach lagging behind when it comes to infrastructure upgrades and faster speeds it would be nice to see some new ISPs step up and build their own services to help push things forward. Do you guys think we need emerging ISPs to usher in faster broadband speeds? How fast is your home connection at the moment?

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