Government urged to boost fibre optic deployment - Fibre Leads

Government urged to boost fibre optic deployment - Fibre Leads The government has been urged to boost the rollout of fibre optic cable broadband technology in the UK.

According to Dame Wendy Hall, the professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, the government's existing proposal for universal 2Mbps broadband across the UK by 2012 is lacking in vision.

She claimed that a number of high bandwidth services, such as high definition video and cloud computing, would not be possible on such an outmoded platform.

"The fact that we're bankrupt and can't afford to put optical fibre anywhere doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it," she claimed, adding: "We need to think harder about what type of society we're going to have in the age of networks and for sure ours is going to be a backward one if we don't get this right."

However, a recent study by Alcatel-Lucent in New Zealand showed that a standard telephone cabling infrastructure can be used to transmit data at up to 70Mbps – which is more than enough for high definition video. ADNFCR-1186-ID-19496867-ADNFCR