Hamadoun Touré of the ITU

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has turned the spotlight on governments at this year’s Mobile World Congress, arguing that “countries need robust national broadband plans to promote faster rollout of fibre networks”, according to this article in the Guardian.

It’s perhaps odd to hear the subject of fibre being raised at a conference dedicated to all things mobile, but Hamadoun Touré, the ITU’s Secretary General, was commenting on the importance of fixed-line infrastructure for mobile backhaul, especially as data traffic surges. He also urged governments to free up spectrum for new mobile-phone services.

The UK government, in particular, has come in for criticism in this area. Besides being slow to auction off new spectrum, it has still not launched four pilot projects announced in October as part of its national broadband plan.

Perhaps more troublingly, the UK’s broadband plan appears to lack ambition when compared with those in other countries. Our own recently released government broadband index (gBBi), which looks at countries on the basis of their national broadband plans, ranks the UK in the bottom three countries out of the 16 assessed.

The UK suffers in our index for setting relatively low targets for the speed of next-generation and universal broadband services, and for aiming to cover a smaller share of the population with superfast networks than governments elsewhere. What’s more, regulatory measures aimed at facilitating competition are less advanced than in other parts of Europe, and particularly neighbouring France.

Visit www.eiu.com/broadbandreport for more details of Full speed ahead: The government broadband index Q1 2011.

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