There are a host of Election promises being thrown around by the various political parties ahead of the General Election. Naturally many are Brexit related, but others refer to life after Brexit including everything from being an 80% carbon free country in just a decade to billions for the NHS, a shorter working week, a rise to the minimum pay, investment in the police, and scrap tuition fees.
But there is one election promise that has grabbed the headlines and that is the audacious Labour policy to give free broadband to everyone. This wouldn’t just be the fibre broadband but full fibre broadband which would remove copper cables and involve running a fibre optic cable into every household in the country. The difference is gigabit speeds come with full fibre, or 1,000Mbps compared to a maximum of 66Mbps on fibre where the final connection is over existing copper cables. Full fibre broadband is currently only available to about 7% of the UK so it’s a massive undertaking to make it available to everyone, let alone give it away for free.
Currently, the best connection you are ever likely to see is actually on mobile where with 4G+ you can get up to 150Mbps or 5G at 300Mbps, but this is only available with the most up to date smartphones and in tiny areas of the country.
Labour’s plan would be to privatise BT Openreach and has threatened to privatise other companies if they didn’t come on board – by which you can take it to mean privatising Sky and Virgin’s broadband operations.
The reality of this however is the sheer cost involved – half the country still can’t get access to even the most basic of broadband services or when they do it’s at very slow speed. Many can’t even access 3g mobile services. Rolling out fibre to every household in the country would involve digging up every street in the country to run cables and then from the roadside to the house for the final fibre connection. Labour reckon the cost would be around £20 billion with maintenance costs of around £230 million a year coming from big tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon who Labour think don’t pay their fair share of tax anyway.
However full fibre broadband for free would be a massive boon for the average votor, especially those paying an average of around £30 a month for a service which is quite frankly a bit rubbish in many cases. Labour reckons it would take a decade to roll out with an ambition to complete by 2030 so don’t expect your megafast free broadband any time soon… and that comes with the rider that Labour have to first win the Election.
As a consumer it’s hard not to like Labour’s free fibre broadband election promises. As a business you might worry that if the tech giants get taxed more that they’ll simply pass it on to the small businesses using their platforms. Amazon have form for doing this having already increased merchant fees to cover the 3% digital tax in France. There’s nothing much that comes for free from governments that consumers and businesses don’t end up paying for in one form or another.
from Ecommerce – Tamebay https://ift.tt/33RElzF via IFTTT
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