Good Lord: Mandelson makes a big mistake

After a hectic Christmas and New Year period, I found myself settling back into the old routine at work, but my enjoyment of restored peace was shattered when I found my blood pressure rapidly rising again this morning.

Yet again, the cause of my rage was Peter Mandelson. Not content with sticking his oar in on the subject of file-sharing, thus wiping out carefully brokered agreements in one fell swoop, Mandy is now showing how ignorant he is – or at least the aides in his department are – of the state of broadband in the UK.

While launching a consultation into providing £1bn to fund next-generation access in rural communities in the UK, with the aim of getting 90 per cent of the population on an NGA network by 2017 (which, by the way, I think is a good thing), he made the following comment:

"Already the market is delivering super-fast internet speeds of 50Mbps to half the country."

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I imagine he's referring to Virgin Media, which has a network capable of reaching around half the households in the UK and offers a 50Mbps product.

That's a far cry from half the households in the UK actually getting 50Mbps because, for a start, Virgin Media has only four million broadband customers – equivalent to 16 per cent of the country – and only a portion of these are on the 50Mbps product.

And he surely can't be referring to BT, which has stated the aim of getting 40 per cent of UK households connected to a super-fast network by 2012. Unless he's managed to travel forward in time.

So, as our American friends might say, I call BS. We can only speculate on the reason for such a misleading comment. Is it ignorance? Or is he trying to pull the wool over our eyes?

That said, the consultation Mandelson has announced is encouraging. £1bn of government money to fund rural broadband over the next eight years is a good start, and with private investment already contributing to next-generation access, the UK's broadband network could be in pretty good shape by 2017. But let's not pretend that it already is, Mandy, OK?