2013-03-11 12:19:36 - The latest poll of more than 780 online readers of the ISPreview.co.uk consumer information website have discovered that 71% think the UK government is doing a poor job of helping to expand the coverage of superfast broadband services to 90% of people by 2015.

A new web-based poll conducted with 782 Internet users in the United Kingdom has revealed that over two thirds of respondents (71%) think the government is making "poor" progress towards its goal of improving the country's national broadband infrastructure by 2015 (15% viewed the progress as "average" and just 7.5% felt it was "good").

The UK government aims to make superfast broadband services available to 90% of people by 2015 and it also wants everybody to have access to internet download speeds of at least 2Mbps (Megabits per second) by the same date. But only 16% of respondents to the survey felt that the current coalition was doing a better job for broadband than the previous Labour government and 36% said

they were about the same.

Unfortunately the project has been hit by a series of delays and was most recently affected by a dispute over state aid approval from the European Commission. The culture secretary, Maria Miller, promptly blamed the delay on "stifling EU bureaucracy" but the EU said it was due to late paper work from the UK. Respondents to our survey were similarly split but most still blamed the UK.

Who is most to blame for the six month state aid clearance delay (broadband funding)?
UK Government - 46.9%
Don't Know / Other - 26.9%
European Commission - 21.3%
ISPs - 4.7%

"There's now a very real danger of the national target slipping into 2016," said ISPreview.co.uk's Founder, Mark Jackson. "It's vital that the country's leaders put aside their political blame games and instead work together to ensure that all the necessary legislation and paper work is completed. Only then can operators, such as BT, begin to focus on the arduous task of actually rolling the new services out."