British broadband some of the slowest in Europe

Britain's Internet has been ranked among the slowest in Europe and professionals are worried that the island nation is beginning to fall behind the upgrade trend. "Britain is being frozen out of the next industrial revolution," warned Peter Cochrane, a former BT chief technology officer. "In terms of broadband, the UK is at the back of the pack. We're beaten by almost every other European country and Asia leaves us for dust." In the report South Korea and Japan were ranked at the top of the list, massively outstripping other countries, including technologically advanced nations like the USA. Compared to our Western cousins though, the UK still lags behind. The problem comes in the laying of fibre optic cable - the next step in bringing super fast broadband Internet to homes. It has already seen usage in the UK with some 400,000 homes being connected. However, compare that with other nations like France, which already has six million hooked up and Russia, which has reached 12 million, Great Britain looks significantly lacking. This is despite the fact that the UK is easily the smallest of these countries. We are advancing, but at a snail's pace. The current government is pushing to have all homes with some form of broadband by 2015 - this doesn't even guarantee a 2Mbps speed. Compare this with France, which plans to have over 70 per cent of premises connected directly to a network of fibre cable by 2020 and even nearly 10 years down the line, the UK looks woefully inequipped. Even if the next administration or the current one decides to up spending and really push for fibre optics, we'll still be capped to about 80Mbps, because current fibre plans from BT are to lay the new cable along streets and connect individual homes with traditional copper wiring. Elsewhere in the world, where direct fibre connections are more common, they'll quickly see speeds of up to 1000Mbps.