Leader: Broadband Britain - not there yet

There's no question the UK has come a long way in promoting the rollout of broadband internet connectivity since the dark days of being a high-speed internet laggard mired in an uncompetitive market and endless arguments about local loop unbundling.

Taking an average of the various reports into the broadband market, the UK is now around third in Europe behind only France and Germany in the number of broadband users.

But two developments this week should serve as a wake-up call to the fact there is still a lot of work to do. Firstly, silicon.com discovered the government's much-touted broadband aggregation scheme has effectively been canned less than a year after it started.

It seems to have been nothing more than a government initiative founded more on its headline-grabbing predictions of £200m savings towards the public sector's £1bn broadband bill rather than on any real long-term substance. The £15m of funding allocated was hardly a major vote of confidence in the scheme and while some would argue it is money wasted, it is a drop in the public spending ocean.

The government will not subsidise the rollout of broadband to parts of the country where it is not economically viable for telecoms suppliers to do so. That means the rule of market forces and the regions will have to make a go of it on a commercially self-sufficient basis now, with many of the aggregation bodies clearly falling by the wayside as a result.

The other warning comes from the Broadband Industry Group (BIG) – made up of BT competitors - in its state of the nation report about the wholesale broadband market. The group claims BT still has a 90 per cent "stranglehold" on the non-cable wholesale broadband market despite regulator Ofcom's intervention and that there needs to be a level playing field to ensure Britain has a competitive broadband market.

All these developments serve to highlight that in the broadband market there are still many complex issues to negotiate and there is still much disagreement over the level of involvement of the industry regulator and government in resolving them. We've come a long way but let's not start patting ourselves on the back just yet.