Small businesses lambast UK broadband policy for being “in a time warp”

London, Manchester: Accessibility to good broadband remains a luxury – rather than the necessity it has to be – for the UK's army of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which make up to 97 percent of the British economy, says the UK Federation of Small Businesses (FSB).

It says that SMEs, particularly those located in rural areas, are still finding their ambitions to build their businesses severely hampered by the inaccessibility of high-speed, low contention broadband.

The UK government had recently announced that it would come to the rescue of businesses without broadband with a commitment to provide a universal broadband service with speeds of up to 2Mbps by 2012.

However, the FSB has lambasted these plans as lacking ambition and being in a ''time warp''.

''More than half of small businesses rely on the Internet for up to 50 per cent of their annual turnover, yet simple tasks such as emailing, marketing, buying and selling are time-consuming because their broadband speeds are letting them down,'' said John Wright, national chairman, FSB.

According to Mark Seemann, product strategy and development director at communications and hosted IT provider Outsourcery, said, ''The reality is that the plans to increase broadband speeds do not go anywhere near far enough. The aim is essentially to tinker with the broadband speed rather than solving the underlying issue which is that the UK is using arcane technology. The nation's copper infrastructure desperately needs to be upgraded to fibre optic in order to satisfy businesses requirements for today and in the future.''