BT chief rules out DSL for all

NEWS BT chief executive Sir Peter Bonfield dropped a broad hint last night that BT's reluctant broadband rollout may soon be coming to a complete halt. The speech was short on specifics, but it did seem to suggest that the rollout of the telco's DSL services will not reach far beyond the 60 per cent of the population already within the catchment area of DSL exchanges. He said: "Some parts of the country are not technically viable for DSL - because too great a proportion of customers live too far from the exchange to receive it. "Other areas are not commercially viable. In these, the size of the exchange area means that forecast demand is so low that we cannot justify the rate of return to our shareholders," Bonfield added. The announcement is a clear indication that BT will be throttling back on its investment in DSL, and will quite likely fall short of government targets for Britain to have the most extensive broadband market in the G7 by 2005 - a target which a BT spokesman described as "quite aggressive". BT has no official target for the percentage of the population covered by DSL, though in questions and answers after the speech Bonfield estimated that the country would reach 25 per cent broadband coverage by 2003. He also called for the government to subsidise broadband for otherwise uneconomic areas, an idea that BT has endorsed before. "The burden of investment cannot be borne by a single company," he said. The BT chief executive was delivering the annual Hinton lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineers.