I'll take that money...
They don't need a quango to decide this - just post an article here and I'm sure they'd get enough info/opinion to justify the usual massive expenses.
My suggestions - break up BT; make the backbones a 'national asset' and actually put some action behind the works. Like other folks have already said - apart from big business, there's not many folks who need more than 100Mb/s and heck G'bit would be nice to have.
Sheesh, you know you're in a digital dungheap when Vermin Media looks technically competent. And at the moment they do - 10-50Mb/s (very theoretically!) to the cabled houses - with 200Mb/s being discussed (not for my area though).
And what do the Phorm-whore's at BT give me - 2Mb/s (maybe!) with maybe 8Mb/s when 21CN goes live locally sometime in 2012-2013. Big effing deal!
Anyhoo, back to the point. If we get rid of the daft speed assertion then I'm pretty damned sure that the cost to implement will come down to a far more reasonable figure. So don't bail out the next pigopolist bankers, scrap the daft ID card scheme and HO megadatabase and DPI wet dreams and the infrastructure will be all paid for.