Britain has been trundling along in the broadband slow lane for years now, so BT’s plan to accelerate towards speeds of 100 megabits per second is welcome, if overdue. The rise of bandwidth-hungry applications such as online video and gaming has left some parts of the network creaking at peak times, with few people getting anything like the speeds their internet service providers have promised.

BT had to do something, if only to protect its own business. Many people, especially heavy web users, now rarely use landline phones and keep the contract only because their web connection demands it. Now, the rise of mobile broadband, which bypasses the landline and connects PCs directly to the mobile phone network, is beginning to pose a threat to BT’s last monopoly.

The promise of a 100Mbps web connection would keep many people tied to the BT network, and appeal to precisely the big-spending customers who might be tempted by profitable web TV and video-on-demand packages.

The drawback of the plan is that it will do nothing for those who currently put up with the country’s slowest web speeds. The new fibre-optic network is likely to benefit the ten million households which already have the fastest web connections, but bring no improvement to the many small towns and rural areas that lag behind.

From BT’s perspective, this makes sense. Replacing copper wires with fibre cables requires a huge investment, and that money can only be recouped in areas with a high population density. The good news for people who don’t fit into BT’s plans is that rival companies and rival technologies may soon give them an alternative.

Mobile broadband depends on access to the high-speed 3G mobile network, and while that remains patchy in rural areas, it already covers twice as many people as BT’s fibre network will on completion in 2012. By then, it’s safe to assume, mobile broadband will be faster, cheaper and more widely available, and other wireless technologies such as WiMAX may also be rivalling fixed-line broadband.

The resulting blend of copper wires, fibre-optic cables and wireless hotspots will certainly be more complex than the unified network bequeathed us by the Victorians, but that may be no bad thing. With our rapidly increasing demands for data on tap, we have outgrown the one-size-fits-all network.

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