For quite some time I've been talking about the need for the UK telecoms industry to wean itself off the high copper diet it uses to deliver services to the home - laws of physics dicate that real broadband can't be delivered over this material and economics dictate the national GDP will suffer in the new world if we don't have hundreds of megbytes per second to the home. The only way of doing this is to replace the copper with fibre optics to the home (FTTH) which would allow essentially unlimited bandwidth in the final mile.

These days BT claims it can't afford it, however their former CTO Peter Cochrane produced the business case which justified it 21 years ago, and indeed the UK is already falling behind other countries in this area. It should be noted that on average each of us lives within just 1Km of a fibre optic cable.

I read the HM Government is now looking into the possibility of helping to find this civil engineering project - headed by Stephen Timms, the UK's minister for competitiveness (a splendid fellow - I've met him a few times) who will chair a summit on the topic. I'd suggest sending a letter to him at the House to help influence him. I'll be mailing mine today.

In a related piece, Ashford, Folkestone and Dover are the lucky recipients of a Virgin Media trial of 50Mbps broadband services whiich s based on the cable technology known as DOCSIS - using version 3 - and which delivers up to 5 times the maximum possible under BT's plans to roll out VDSL.

So, are we on the verge of a real 21st Century network, or wil BT leave it's customers on 19th Century copper?

For all of our sakes, I hope they make the right decision.

Cheers

Neil