Lord Carter's Digital Britain interim report suggests that every home in the UK should have at least 2Mbps broadband by 2012. That's about the dullest and most non-committal statement we could have had.

A universal service guarantee is, however, no bad thing for the 40 per cent of homes still broadband-less, but we're Britain! We owned the world. Conquered the seas. Battled the worst. So, why can't we get decent broadband pipes?

The problem lies in how any next-gen broadband roll-out would be funded – a perennially thorny debate Carter has done little to assuage in his interim report, saying "this Strategy Group will, by the time of the final Digital Britain Report, assess the case for how far market led investment by Virgin Media, BT Group plc and new network enterprises will take the UK in terms of roll-out and likely take-up."

I've attended several slightly-dull governmental and third-party meetings on the 'future of broadband' and the same repetitive refrain has come out of each: nobody can decide how the bill for 'next-gen broadband' should be footed and, when in doubt, ISPs will blame the BBC (for iPlayer) and say it should stump up some licence fee cash.

Increasing the divide

Nobody has the funds to roll out a complete fibre network to the UK and make it pay – that's the bottom line. Carter says the government shouldn't have to lay it, but it will decide whether to help large telcos like BT to have a go – by lending them the notes. But will they go for it? Surely not.

End-users won't want to pay (much) more for faster broadband than they currently do for normal-speed broadband, so recouping the billions involved seems an impossible task. Indeed, it just reminds me of the huge funds telcos laid down for 3G licences.

Certainly in the short to medium term we're going to see a situation where Virgin Media customers are the lucky ones. Virgin is already rolling out 50Mbps broadband across its network and has already talked up 100Mbps.

That, combined with the creation of other next-gen networks elsewhere in the UK, will only widen the digital divide between areas where it's cost-effective to install networks and rural areas left with 2 Mbps access. And in the long term, that's a very bad thing.