Why?

The EU hardly the the money to pay for a round of drinks never mind financing £8bn of interweb access so people in the sticks can access Idiotbook and download pron, as a previous thread pointed out most people got their pron from underneath hedges and the country side has plenty of hedges, ergo plenty of pron.

The EU morons ought to keep out of it and let the free market decide, it was this sort of meddling that got the whole Euro zone into the mess that it is now.

It's more to stimulate business growth. Unless you pay top rates to have an office in the city centre, or you're fortunate enough to be close to the exchange when you have an office at the edge of town then you either have to buy a lease line (for a SMB it's not going to happen) or you have to put up with >10Mb down and like 0.3Mb up until the two big suppliers decide it's commercially viable to upgrade the lines, which is never.

And with more and more small businesses moving out due to traffic, rents etc etc they end up throttled by **** broadband. And not everyone is fortunate to live right on a technology park.

Government intervention in the free market is never a good idea.

So they tax us and then spend our money and call it "stimulating the market". They ought to let us keep the money and allow us to decide how we spend the money. The job of govenment is to keep our streets safe, provide a certain level of education and run a few hospitals but never is it the responsiblity of the government to intervene in the free market other than setting taxes.

I for one don't care if businesses in the sticks have slow broadband, I as a tax payer should not be required to pay for this. Let the market decide.

I would say infrastructure is one of the fundamental things the Government should provide for the benefit of all. The Internet is the 21st Century motorway. Remember that it is small businesses that really provide growth, not the FTSE 100s, the more of them able to produce more will eventually mean lower taxes.

One of the most damaging things for the economy is the horrendous infrastructure problems we have in the UK. For an island so small we have entire swathes without even basic internet or phone coverage (the latter being arguably the easiest thing to provide when looking at implementation), we have entire counties blighted by **** travel links, no public transport and then when you finally get a job, hop on public transport you spend 2 hours of your life and 1000s of pounds a year just to work. That doesn't exactly stimulate the economy when most money disappears into basic living standards.

They should have been doing this ages ago, I still don't understand why we are not building duel level motorways. You could turn 6 lanes into 12 for a fraction of the price of widening a lane.

I agree with you that the internet is the 21st Century motorway, just as the railways changed the face of the UK in the 18th and 19th century the internet is changing and has changed the way we do business in the 21st. Although during the 60's many under used branch lines were closed down (by I think it was Bevin), because of the sheer expense at keeping them open. it would be great that everyone had 1gb internet access but not at any price.

If the demand is there then the demand if it is economically viable will be met by some enterprising individual or company to provide the infrastructure otherwise the govenment needs to keep out of it.

The idea of having any government having any hand in any IT project is asking for it to fail.

The govenment can reduce taxes today and allow those that create wealth to decide what the best use of that money is, govenments need only to make decisions regarding their core responsibilities and making sure that people have broadband is not one of them, well not at my expense.