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Conservatives pledge to break BT monopoly and deliver ’super-fast broadband’

The Conservatives have released plans to deliver broadband speeds of 100 Mbps to most homes in the next seven years.

Their aim is to make Britain the first main European country to have internet speeds of 100 Mbps available nationwide and they say they can deliver that by 2017.

This promise comes as part of the Conservative party’s drive to break up what they call BT’s monopoly over internet connections. They want to copy an approach that has been successful abroad, particularly in the Far East and allow other operators to move in with their brands of ducts and fibre cables.

The current Labour government’s target is for homes to be able to get connection speeds of 2Mbps by 2012.

Better cabling would be necessary to deliver such high broadband fees and the cash for this would come from private investors from companies such as Carphone Warehouse and Sky who would be given the permission to provide the service.

If the investments do not materialize then the Conservatives plan to partially finance their scheme using funding from the BBC license fee. The BBC currently allows 3.5% of the fee to go towards setting up the digital switchover and the Conservatives believe that this percentage could be used to fund broadband expansion plans. 

The shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said, “We are currently one of the slowest countries in the developed world for broadband. With the Conservatives we’ll become one of the fastest.”

However Labour Treasury Minister Stephen Timms accused the Tories of “opposing the plans” for current Labour measures to increase broadband speeds and the Liberal Democrats questioned whether the Tories’ plans were economically viable.