A report published in April by the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) called Pipe Dreams? Prospects for Next-Generation Broadband Deployment in the UK paints a worrying picture for the future global competitiveness of the UK.

In it the BSG argues that if the UK starts to lag significantly behind its international competitors in terms of available bandwidth, “the pace of innovation in the economy could slip behind that of those competitors”.

The warning is backed up by Point Topic analyst and author of World Broadband Statistics: Q4 2006, Vince Chook, who said Europe is in danger of losing its status as a “bandwidth first world continent”.

Chook acknowledged that BT is investing £10bn in its ADSL 2+ 21st Century Network project, which will deliver up to 24Mbit/s downstream speeds for residential customers by 2010, but pointed out that Japanese telecoms firm NTT Japan alone will spend £26bn in the same period on a fibre network capable of delivering 100Mbit/s.

“Without fibre, Europe will rapidly become the digital slowcoach on the information super highway,” Chook said.

To address this danger, the BSG argues that moves to the next generation of connectivity “will require the deployment of optical fibre deeper into the local access network, either to the street cabinet or directly to the customer premises”.

Another recent report, Very High Speed Broadband: A Case for Intervention, produced by Enders Analysis in January, estimated the capital cost of providing fibre to 90 percent of UK households to be £9.5bn.

The BSG report gives nine recommendations to safeguard the UK’s competitiveness, ranging from monitoring the demand for bandwidth and benchmarking UK communications infrastructure with those of competitor nations, to identifying models for efficient public sector intervention.

However, Dan Cole, head of product management at ISP Thus, argued that the UK’s economic competitiveness is affected just as much by business services, and that these require high-speed upstream connectivity as well as downstream speeds. “It’s no good if you’ve got 10Mbit/s or 50Mbit/s downstream because business is all about sharing data – you need two-way bandwidth,” he explained.

Cole pointed out that it is how these intelligent networks are run that is far more important than absolute bandwidth speeds. “With MPLS and QoS you can better utilise the speeds you’ve already got. I think it’s better to use money putting equipment close to the edge of the network rather than spend lots of money digging up the road and sticking in more fibre,” added Cole.