We need joined-up thinking over broadband shambles

IT seems from reading your article (Yorkshire Post, July 16) that the present system of trying to provide Britain with a high- speed broadband fibre-optic system – that is based on regional areas, and with different types of technology that are not suitable to connect to the national network and therefore means internet service providers (ISPs) are not interested – is patently not going to work. Yet the Government carries on with it.

This is probably because the EU says that the provision of such a network has to be put out to tender for each area and has led to only some three per cent of British homes having high speed broadband as of now, whatever bold promises the Government and telecom companies have made, against 50 per cent in South Korea where there isn’t such a directive (and the rest of Europe has the same problem).

Because ISPs are not interested, even with a subsidy it seems that these small areas cannot get a big enough customer base – that is if they can get customers – in the highly-populated areas to get the income to be able to provide fibreoptic cabling to the low population and remote areas.

Forget EU directives. OK, we can have some competition, but we should only allow, say, three preferred bidders in order to have competitive pricing. Each would be big enough to raise the money to do the required work, making sure they use technology that is compatible with the trunk network (also making sure that BT is one of these – let us keep something British) that local areas can use.

BT has said it will be uneconomical to lay fibre optics to areas of low population and remote areas without a subsidy.

We should hand the £530m to them, or at least proportion it out between the three preferred contractors according to the number of area contracts obtained.

If the above was to happen, and with the economy of scale that these companies have, they will be able to do the work cheaper than the smaller ones. I would like to bet that the whole of Britain would be covered by fibre optic cabling before the 2015 deadline for just North Yorkshire.

Incidentally, what is going to happen to the hundreds of miles of cable that Digital Region has already laid in South Yorkshire?

Are they technically suitable? Will BT duplicate them or buy them up?

How many more hundreds of miles of incompatible cables are going to be laid before sense prevails?