Britons will have to foot the bill for new infrastructure

Britons will ultimately end up footing the bill for the installation of next generation broadband infrastructure Ofcom has warned.

Speaking at a Video on Demand conference last week Jeremy Olivier, the regulator’s, head of convergent media said that ADSL2+ networks with at least a 24Mbits/sec connection were needed to deliver multimedia services, but consumers would “have to pay to build this.”

However, delegates at the conference heard that ISPs felt costs were currently prohibitive and there was not the consumer demand at the moment to build faster networks.

A representative from Sky said: “We offer DVD like quality for our Sky online service and for what we do here at the moment the current broadband infrastructure works.”

Laurence Harrison, director at the Consumer Electronics Intellect said ISPs inclination is to come back in a few years time when the infrastructure has been sorted out.

“They don’t want to pay for this new broadband,” he said.