Faster internet access for everyone does not come cheap - and the whole industry may have to chip in, write Richard Wray and James Robinson in The Observer.

It is a breathtakingly ambitious plan to connect every home in Britain to the internet by 2012, but who will pay for it? Communications minister Lord Carter unveiled his plan for a multi-billion-pound, high-speed broadband network this week, promising to turn the country into a digital nirvana by the time the London Olympics start.

Gordon Brown regards it as a national infrastructure project that will place Britain in the vanguard of the information age, a 21st-century equivalent of the huge public works programmes that helped lift the US out of the Depression.

To read this report in The Observer in full, see:
www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/01/mediabusiness