We may be 7th in percentage terms, behind some of the smaller European countries, but according to page 7 of that PDF we're second behind Germany in actual number of broadband lines, and slightly ahead of France.

It is typically arrogant and quite impossible for anyone pushing pens to think to regulate the Internet. ITs Virtualisation makes it impossible. Although we can all see that it is getting very crowded in the lower chambers with all manner of minion wanting to milk IT with rules to channel funding.

Governments and Administrations/Gangs and Cartels would do better to realise that IT Virtualisation is much more a Space Mission Control Discipline than a TeleCommunications one and they need to up their performance quite considerably to even begin to understand what they are up against.... which, as soon as they might, will disappear and reboot as something else that they know nothing about.

In one part of the Internet you have the Neanderthals throwing sticks and stones at each other..... Countries at War with themselves and with others ..... and in another part, the machinery which activates them and pays them to do their dumb things, which have invariably been pre-arranged to keep them busy feathering the Cuckoos Nests. Only the one of them is easily fixed or completely destroyed with a few lines of code injected at the top to trigger AI Clarity.... NEUKlearer Transparency. And IT is a Virtual Force QuITe Immune to Physical Attack and/or Intimidation ....... but if Tilting at Windmills is your bag, so be it. It's your free choice to waste imagination.

We may have a large percentage of uptake, but what's the actual quality of what we're getting? I've already written to my MP about dodgy practices of my former ISP in putting through an upgrade I agreed to over the phone without ever providing a contract in physical or electronic form. The fact that nearly every provider seems to have a 12-month to 18-month lock-in and there are no regulated minimum connectivity speeds means that most providers are selling 8Mbps but aren't actually required to deliver anything above 512kbps...the carousel of fun with tech support at these places is also quite the treat. Near as I've found Be have the best thing going, but if you're not within distance of an exchange you're out of luck.

Fibre to the curb at a minimum is needed to ensure the bulk of the population can get something approaching reliable service if the government is serious about universal penetration. Personally I think the State should own the infrastructure rather than BT or some other private for-profit entity. The question is whether or not we have the dosh and want to spend it on that.

In the meantime Ofcom could start by ensuring further consumer protection against the blackguards that seem to plague the ISP industry presently.

Do you mean "die hard agent of the telcos with a fantastic retirement plan" or perhaps "reject from the RAND corporation who has not yet understood that game theory is ineffective in socio demographic modelling and regulation".

Perhaps if our OFCON spent a little less time telling their buddies in the telco industry "don't worry we'll make this nasty investigation into price fixing of international roaming go away" they might be able to pull their heads out of their sphincters for long enough to do what we, the taxpayers are paying them to do. Of course, one neat solution would be to bar them from accepting any highly paid role at a telco after leaving OFCON quietly by the backdoor as this would remove much of their incentive. I may be old fashioned but in my view civil servants are meant to work for the people who currently pay them.

One also has to ask quite who, in our bought and paid for government, decided that the best head of an industry regulator was a market forces drone? Isn't that a bit like sending Tony Blair to broker peace in the middle east? It would be interesting to discover how many 'Archers' (£2,000 in an unmarked envelope) it took in party donations to secure this appointment.

Until people like Timms stop lying and admit something drastic needs to be done, there will be no real solution.

I hope the EU does get it's way. It's clear that, despite the government in principal wanting to improve things, thanks to OFCOM and BT the chances of it actually happening are slim. The EU will not be afraid of upsetting BT or other big players.

at last Europe may Do Something Useful

Ofcom haven't done anything bordering on useful in their entire existence. They have let the incumbent telco get away with passing off an obsolete copper network off as broadband, and the government have believed the job is done. Fibre to the kerb is an absolute minimum if we are to compete in the world economy. Fibre to the home would cost a fiver per house. The Government have their heads in the sand and I hope the commissioner makes them listen to sense instead of the jobsworths they listen to at ofcom and BT.

fibre is the way to go, the sooner the better. Copper is ok for phones. Real broadband needs fibre, what passes for broadband in this country isn't the real thing at all. Soon people will realise this. If the economics of FTTH isn't a sensible one to recoup investment then either the govt should build and own the infrastructure or they should stop saying we have broadband in this country cos we don't. Certain areas might have it but the vast majority get under a meg, and lots of people can't get even that, there are still many notspots. AQA say 44% of internet users in the uk are affected by their ISP not living up to connection speed claims. 63336.com