The British Government thinks they can pay for bringing fast internet to rural GB by putting a yearly tax on fixed phone lines.

BBC online:
The government’s controversial broadband tax has been given the green light by chancellor Alistair Darling in his pre-Budget report.

The £6-a-year levy will be imposed on all households with a fixed line phone.

The money made will be put into a fund to ensure rural areas of the UK do not miss out on super-fast broadband services.

The money is earmarked for the 30% of homes that experts think will be by-passed by commercial fast broadband plans.

It is estimated that the broadband tax would raise about £170m a year, which is a wee bit short of the estimate of £5bn needed to provide super-fast fibre services to every UK home.

Currently BT is committed to rolling out next-generation broadband to about 40% of the UK with Virgin Media offering speeds of up to 50Mbps to about half of UK homes.

The tax wont pay the bills, but they can always raise it after the elections, and the advertised speed of the fibre is mostly advertising hype.

Anyone who’s ever dealt with internet service providers knows that the rates will always go up, and the maximum advertised speed has very little to do with what real people get, or for that matter, can afford.

Here in Las Vegas, Cox offers a maximum speed of 50Mbps down/5Mbps up, with up to 55Mbps “burst” using PowerBoost®, but the cost is currently $119.00 per month. You need to be a hardcore gamer or a downloader of very large files to justify the cost.

Fortunately, the actual speed of high-speed internet doesn’t really matter to someone like me who doesn’t play games or download large files.

Even 3 Mbps beats the hell out of dialup with it’s 56k advertised speed and it’s less than 50k real life speed.