The UK Government has vowed to fund expansion of the country’s sub-standard broadband service with the introduction of a 50p a month tax on everyone who uses a standard landline. Stephen Timms, the financial secretary to the treasury has said that this tax will be made law before the end of the current Parliament next May.
The tax is expected to raise up to £175million a year. It was proposed in June to subsidise a fibre-optic network that can support broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps but in reality it could be that it will just be an extension of the already ancient copper cable system.
The plan has drawn howls of opposition from consumer groups and some politicians who believe that the end user should not have to subsidise telecomms giant BT which, unsurprisingly, welcomes the initiative and it will in effect will receive a taxation subsidy of around of an estimated £172million a year.
BT’s record at rolling out broadband outside of the heavily populated urban environments is woefully inadequate. In my own village, 10 miles from the nearest largest town, BT has paid meagre lip service to providing broadband and a few residents are limping along with a 200k connection. On a good day with a following wind you might be able to use Skype without sounding like someone with a stutter but if you are a graphic artist forget it!
Now I know it is my decision to live out in the sticks and that I should live with the downsides as well as the positive benefits but I doubt if I will see a decent broadband landline connection in my village for four or five years at the earliest yet I will have to cough up £300 over that time to pay for almost every other bugger to get it!
I can recall when our local Tesco supermarket in Carlisle – 23 miles away – launched its home delivery service, Using a dial-up connection it was actually quicker to drive to the shop and do the shopping and drive back than it was to wade through the various menus ands get the weekly shop worked out and ordered!
Some time ago I decided that I was so sick of BT (I call them Bleedin’ Tossers) that I took my landline and calls away to another provider. Some poor devil at BT was given the task of phoning me to find out why I was deserting such a wonderful organisation and I don’t think they were prepared for the polite but robust diatribe that I delivered.
Britain long ago gave up its manufacturing heritage and has evolved into a service provider and with global wetting or global warming it makes sense to create an infrastructure that allows people to work from home part or all of the time to reduce commute times and fuel use. Teleworking or telecommuting has been on the political agenda since the 90s but no Government has had the balls to encourage adoption of such a socially and economic beneficial practice.
To date the Government and BT have created a rural underclass, an economic wilderness in which people who can create wealth without living in noisy, dirty and violent cities, sprawling urban towns and the grey suburbs strive to make a living.
I think that come next May’s general election that the electorate will have had enough of Labour and cast them into the political wilderness for many decades, but whether or not the Conservatives assuming they win will tackle this and even dramatically re-nationalise BT remains to be seen.
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