Digital Britain

[davieG]

From the BBC

Every Briton with a fixed-line phone will pay a "small levy" of 50p per month to pay for faster net access.

The national fund created by the levy will be used to ensure most Britons get access to future net technologies.

The proposal is part of the Digital Britain report outlined by Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw in Parliament.

The report also includes a pledge to curb unlawful file sharing by giving regulator Ofcom new powers to identify persistent pirates.

To encourage take-up of broadband services the government has appointed online entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox as a digital champion.

Mr Bradshaw told the Commons that the government intended to upgrade all national radio stations from analogue to digital by 2015.

It promised a "more robust" system of content classification for the video games industry.

The report, commissioned by the government last year and written by communications minister Lord Carter, offers a blueprint for the UK's digital future.

"Digital Britain is a statement of intent and ambition, a commitment to infrastructure and access, and an overdue recognition of the industrial importance of the creative industries," said Lord Carter.

The main points outlined in the report include:

• a three-year plan to boost digital participation

• universal access to broadband by 2012

• fund to invest in next generation broadband

• digital radio upgrade by 2015

• liberalisation of 3G spectrum

• legal and regulatory attack on digital piracy

• support for public service content partnerships

• changed role for Channel 4

• consultation on how to fund local, national and regional news

• £130m of BBC licence fee to pay for ITV regional news

One of the biggest surprises in the report was the promise to introduce a levy on fixed telephone lines in order to pay for fast broadband rollout to those areas of the country - estimated to be around one-third - which won't be reached by commercial efforts.

It will amount to a 50p a month tax for every household in the country with a fixed phone line.

"It is a contribution which we are asking people to make - it's six pounds a year - offset, as we make very clear in the report, by the likely continued reduction in headline prices because of the competitive market we have in this country," said report author Lord Carter.

Antony Walker, chief executive of the Broadband Stakeholders' Group, believes the tax will mean that 90% of the UK will be able to benefit from broadband of up to 50Mbps by 2017.

"It is a top-up subsidy for the last third of the country and must focus on those areas that would otherwise be uneconomic to deliver fast services to," he said.

He thinks it will eliminate the problem of a two-tiered internet where towns and cities benefit from fast speeds while rural areas remain in the slow lane.

But Alex Salter, from broadband measurement firm Sam Knows, doubts the levy will create enough money to bring next-generation access to every home.

"It answers the main question from the last report which was who is going to pay. This is less expensive per capita than similar schemes, for example in Australia, but is unlikely to generate the full budget required - this will still have to come from the providers," he said.

Communications minister Stephen Carter said that some £200m of funding would be spent to extend coverage to the 15% of UK homes which do not receive broadband at 2Mbps.

The government has pledged to complete this by 2012.

The majority of the money will come from funding ring-fenced in the BBC licence fee for the digital switchover.

Some of this money will also be used to support regional news on commercial channels.

Sir Michael Lyons, BBC Trust chairman said it would fight any changes to the licence fee.

Backstop powers

To combat the growing problem of illegal file-sharing the government has given greater powers to Ofcom and internet service providers.

It will allow them to identify illegal downloaders and pursue a "write and sue" approach for the worst offenders.

But the British Phonographic Industry, which represents the UK's record labels, was not impressed.

"The government appears to be anticipating its failure by lining up backstop powers for Ofcom to introduce technical measures later," said the BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor.

The shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said the document was a "colossal disappointment."

World class?

Prime minister Gordon Brown said that the report would pave the way to making Britain's digital infrastructure world class.

"Britain is going to lead the world. This is us taking the next step into the future to being the digital capital of the world. It is making sure no family or business misses out," he said.

Currently Britain stands at about seventh in global broadband league tables, below nations such as Korea, Japan, Sweden and Norway.

The digital and communications industry in the UK is said to be worth around £52bn a year. Lord Carter estimated that some 22 million Britons rely on the industry for their daily work.

Digital Britain was launched in October 2008 to establish a framework for the UK's digital economy. There then followed eight months of lobbying and consultation with an interim report published in January.

Lord Carter is due to quit his post during the summer recess.

The report was a joint effort between the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

[davieG]

On the other hand?

Rory Cellan-Jones | 19:35 UK time, Tuesday, 16 June 2009

This morning, as he visited the Crystal Palace digital television transmitter, the Prime Minister made an extraordinary promise. Just hours before the publication of Digital Britain, he said this:"Britain's going to lead the world. This is us taking the next step into the future, being the digital capital of the world, making the necessary investment."

Make no mistake - that is a hugely ambitious statement - a bit like the manager of Manchester City promising that his team will win the Champions' League within the next couple of years. International comparisons of broadband speeds are pretty difficult - nobody seems to collect reliable data - but to be top of the league you have to compete with the likes of South Korea and Japan, where many householders have come to think that 100Mbps is just about the least they can expect from their internet connection.

So surely Lord Carter would have to pull a rabbit out of the hat in his long-awaited report - after all the 2Mbps minimum service level that we've been hearing about for months was never going to make Britain the "digital capital of the world"? Well there was a rabbit, in the form of a levy on every landline to help pay for next-generation broadband.

The government knows that BT and Virgin may well end up bringing fibre connections to as much as two thirds of the country - though mostly fibre-to-the-cabinet rather than right to the home - but they won't reach the final third because their investors just won't foot the huge bill.

That's where the landline levy comes in. But, at £6 a year on every phone, this new tax is not going to be a huge moneyspinner - it'll raise between £150 and £175 million a year, according to the Department for Business. I put in a quick call to the Broadband Stakeholders' Group, which calculated last year that taking fibre to every corner of Britain would cost as much as £27 billion. Perhaps unsurprisingly this industry lobby group was determined to be positive, insisting that this cash would make a real contribution to keeping Britain in the fast lane.

That may well be the case - but will we lead the world? Look at Australia, where the government promised in April to invest over £20 billion to build a fibre-to-the-home network reaching 90% of households. That plan makes Lord Carter's look very unambitious.

Now given the state of the public finances, the UK government was in no position to promise a multi-billion pound investment - and even a £6 tax on the phone bill may not prove too popular. Still, over the next decade, as much as £1.5 billion in extra funding will go towards giving Britain faster broadband. Will that make us a world-champion? Possibly. But, as Manchester City have found, you can spend an awful lot of cash these days and still struggle to reach the top of the league.

[davieG]

Rory Cellan-Jones | 12:00 UK time, Monday, 15 June 2009

For the past few weeks, the war of words between the creative industries and the internet service providers has become ever more bruising, as Lord Carter's Digital Britain report nears completion.

The music and video companies have demanded that the ISPs take strong action against illegal file-sharers, but they've responded by saying that they don't want to be internet cops, and that anyway beating piracy is a hopeless mission.

But today, there's a sudden outbreak of peace between two of the parties - Universal Music and Virgin Media. The ISP has unveiled a deal where its customers will get unlimited access to download as much music as they want from the Universal catalogue, free of copyright protection, for a monthly fee.

When I was called about this by a PR person, my first reaction was that this was interesting, but far from ground-breaking. After all, there are other "all you can eat" music subscription services.

Then I read further down the press release and found what Virgin was offering in return - action against persistent file-sharers. Here's the key paragraph:

"This will involve implementing a range of different strategies to educate file sharers about online piracy and to raise awareness of legal alternatives. They include, as a last resort for persistent offenders, a temporary suspension of internet access. No customers will be permanently disconnected and the process will not depend on network monitoring or interception of customer traffic by Virgin Media."

That sounds like the "technical measures" that the creative industries want included in the Digital Britain report, as a backup to the despatch of warning letters. But by promising "a temporary suspension of internet access" for persistent offenders, Virgin appears to have gone further than any other ISP in acceding to the demands of the music industry.

What isn't clear is just how they will identify candidates for suspension without network monitoring or interception of customer traffic. How will they know what customers are up to, or whether the files they are sharing are copyrighted, if they don't have a close look at their traffic?

These are questions that I'm about to put to the boss of Virgin Media, Neil Berkett. I'll keep you posted. But, as things stand, it does look as though someone has blinked in the war over piracy.

Update 1503: Having just met this deal's two protagonists, I think I'm a little clearer about what this is about.

Lucian Grainge, the chairman of Universal Music Group International, and Virgin Media's chief executive Neil Berkett were both keen to stress the "carrot" in the deal rather than the stick. They insisted that this kind of unlimited deal was just what customers had been demanding.

"We're giving them what they want," said Neil Berkett, "they will change their behviour."

"We've listened to consumers, we've listened to our artists, this is a real game-changer, we hope," said Lucian Grainge.

But when it came to the stick, Mr Berkett was very keen to play down the steps that would be used against file-sharers: "Yes, there are measures - no different really from what we are already doing; we're using the same technology as all ISPs."

As far as I understand, this means that it would still be Universal spotting the persistent file-sharers linked to Virgin's IP addresses. But Virgin will then get in touch with the customers, with a graduated response, which would culminate in "temporary suspension" of the user's broadband service if he or she failed to respond.

Virgin and Universal seem confident that the whole initiative will have a major effect on attitudes to illegal downloads, even suggesting that it will help achieve the government's target of cutting illegal file-sharing by 70%.

But there are a whole lot of questions still to be answered. Will other music labels come on board before the service's launch, which is due "before Christmas"? How much will the monthly subscription cost?

Will people who've grown used to "free" music from file-sharing really be happy to start paying even a modest fee? And is there a danger that some Virgin broadband customers will be so put off by the company's measures against file-sharers, however limited those might be, that they will choose to move to another ISP?

[Darkzzz_]

I would be willing to pay a modest fee if this included a whole range of downloads and not just music. There will always be ways round it. I see the pirate bay have started a new one up which could tempt me on the fact that no data is stored and therefore can't be tracked.

http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/0...vpn-service.ars

[Daggers]

I would be willing to pay a modest fee

It will be over £30 per month and it will include middle of the road shite only.

The day Virgin send me a letter will be the day I move ISP.

I'm not paying for content I don't want and never will - the whole idea is fucked.

I pay for films and shit already Virgin, I'll have this service for free thanks.

[Darkzzz_]

Very good point actually. I have read a few more details about the proposed plans and I don't like the ideas they have either. I think will just rape the downloads silly as per usual and wait until they threaten me with some stupid letter.

I will then do as you have said, switch ISP.