Johnson secretly scraps flagship promise to roll out superfast internet to every home

[arista]

Typical of our Prime Minister


[But he quietly downgraded the target
to just 85 per cent in details buried in the
Spending Review documents this week.
The move will infuriate millions of Brits
who still struggle to stream a film
because of their crummy internet.
One Tory insider told
The Sun: “There is a worry this will hit
old Red Wall seats that switched to the Tories
at the last election.
“These seats cover large areas of small towns
and villages who might now miss out
on getting superfast broadband.”
Mr Johnson promised to bring
gigabit-capable broadband “to every home
and business across the UK by 2025”,
in the Tory 2019 General Election manifesto.]


https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13320410/pm-scraps-promise-superfast-internet-by-2025/

[joeysteele]

I may surprise here a little.

However with this unexpected and being extremely badly prepared for and during this pandemic.

He cannot do his manifesto commitments.
He will need to clear out some things he promised.

Equally had Labour been the lead in a coalition or small majority government, no way could they have honoured all their manifesto commitments in this pandemic either.

There's much more really serious things Johnson and his government have done in this period of the pandemic than dropping manifesto commitments.

[Oliver_W]

Eh. Superfast internet isn't really a necessity, there are other priorities in these times.

[user104658]

There should be a commitment to get 20+mb (what I would call "functional") broadband to rural areas... getting everywhere onto gigabit broadband is a vanity project with no real necessity. I see very little point in spending billions laying expensive cable to remote areas when it's highly likely that superfast broadband will be able to go entirely cable-free within the next decade.

Most rural areas these days have some great smaller local broadband projects anyway, usually involving over-the-air broadband with a little dish on your roof. My sister could only get 1mb broadband previously (frankly unusable) but now gets about 25mb with a local provider using a dish. It's totally fine for browsing, Netflix, youtube etc. Downloading a very large file would take a while - e.g. it might take 12+ hours to download a Playstation game rather than 3 or 4 hours - but it's certainly not a "necessity" ... just do large file downloads overnight.