Digital Britain: Pay more for landlines and your music

[nixforfun]

Digital Britain- a new report on telecom industry by Lord Carter has made quite a few suggestions to improve UK telecoms sector. This report outlines the UK telecom policy for some years to come. Key highlights for end users are:

•   A tax of 50p a month will be levied on every fixed line connection - to contribute to a fund to provide "seedcorn funding" to operators to build-out rural broadband access. Most of this is supposed to land up with BT which aims to provide universal 2Mbps Broadband across whole of UK by 2012. This is supposed to raise £175 million a year.

•   Proposed strong action against illegal file-sharers and ISPs have been given a target of reducing file sharing by 70%. ISPs would be allowed to resort to measures like port blocking, protocol blocking, URL and IP address blocking, bandwidth capping, bandwidth shaping and filtering of specific content as sanctions.

SO for most of here it means slightly higher landline bills (just 50p) and having to pay for all the music and videos we enjoy !!!