At the beginning of the decade, the UK lagged behind its global competitors in terms of broadband penetration – ranking 24 out of 32 OECD countries and with less than one in ten households with broadband.

The landscape has changed dramatically since then. There are now over 15 million broadband connections, speeds continue to rise while prices have fallen. As broadband has become more ubiquitous, new content, services and applications have emerged to drive demand.

It is therefore tempting to view the UK broadband market as a 'job done'. However, the challenge of being a world leader in the deployment, adoption and exploitation of broadband has not gone away.

As new video-rich, bandwidth-hungry services are developed in the UK and around the world, and as recognition increases that broadband forms the critical underlying infrastructure for a knowledge economy, inceasingly the challenge is to deliver next generation broadband networks.

This challenge raises a number of vital strategic questions that must be tackled by UK government and industry in the coming years:

• How will the next generation of broadband access networks develop to support emerging services and applications and enable the UK to compete in the global marketplace?
• How much speed is enough for both consumers and businesses?
• Given the significant investment costs involved, how will these next generation services be made available outside the more commercially attractive high-density areas?
• What are the commercial, regulatory and policy drivers and barriers?
• How do we avoid creating a new geographic digital divide between urban and rural areas?

The BSG set out the key issues concerning delivery of NGA, and made a series of recommendations for industry and government, in its April 2007 'Pipe Dreams?' report. These were discussed at a follow-up seminar on 09 July 2007, 'From Pipe Dreams to Reality'.