Broadband Britain 'stopped in its tracks'

The government's Broadband Britain campaign has little chance of success without wireless, a senior Intel executive has warned.

Speaking at the 3GSM show in Cannes, Sean Maloney, senior vice president in charge of communications for Intel, said the government's target of making the UK the G7's most competitive market for broadband by 2005 was impossible with existing technology.

"Tony Blair's Broadband Britain campaign has stopped in its tracks. This is because the quality of the copper network isn't good enough to reach places like West Glamorgan and no-one can afford to run fibre to such distant locations," he said.

Instead of relying on DSL the government should be looking at wireless broadband such as WiMax (also known as 802.16) to provide connections, Maloney continued.

WiMax has a theoretical range of 70km but in practice can deliver 10Mbps over a range of three miles.

"WiMax will enable people to connect who can't be reached by copper," added Maloney.

For WiMax to take off in Europe there will need to be a major spectrum reallocation. It is most efficient, and cheapest, at low frequencies, many of which are currently used by analogue televisions.

"Regulatory agencies need to gently persuade older technologies in this lower spectrum to use it more efficiently," said Maloney.

But BT, the owner of the copper network in the UK, says it will offer broadband to 95 per cent of UK households by this summer. And it insisted that much of West Glamorgan already has DSL broadband.

While acknowledging the role of other technologies, BT said that of its 25 exchanges in West Glamorgan, "16 already had ADSL, another was currently being upgraded and seven of the remaining eight had trigger levels set".

The last of the 25, BT said, had fewer than 200 users.

Andy Buss, senior analyst at Canalys, added: "Freeing up lower frequencies could be difficult: look at the hassle to launch Channel Five.

"You aren't going to see regulation moving quickly. In order to have broadband penetration you also need PC penetration into the home and we're only at 40 per cent now."

Additional reporting by Ian Lynch