£29bn to upgrade UK broadband network

Updating the UK’s broadband network to superfast fibre optic cables could cost as much as £29 billion, according to a report released today.

Research by lobbyists for faster broadband, the Broadband Stakeholder Group, found the cost of connecting rural areas to a fibre optic network would be so high that it would prevent network providers BT and Virgin Media from making a profit.

Running fibre-optics cables into every home in the UK would theoretically allow download speeds of 1 gigabit per second.

However, this would cost around £28.8 billion, because almost every street in the UK would need to be dug up to lay the cables.

As such, unless creative solutions are found, one third of the UK population is likely to be stuck with slow broadband.

A cheaper option, costing just £5.1 billion, is ‘fibre to cabinet’, which involves connecting street-level cabinets to fibre optic networks whilst leaving copper wires in place between cabinets and homes.

This would allow download speeds of 30-100Mbps, around half of the speed expected to be achieved over fibre optics by 2012.

With BT currently committing just £1.5 billion to upgrading the broadband network, for much of the UK superfast seems a long way off.