In his first major speech on broadband connectivity, The Minister of State for Competitiveness, Stephen Timms MP has announced that he is to chair a 'high level' summit where the UK's perceived lack of high speed network connectivity will be discussed.

In the speech, made at the Broadband Stakeholder Group's (BSG) new work programme launch, Timms pointed to Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) records which found that other countries were using next generation services, like fibre connections, while the UK was lagging behind.

In a statement he said that the number of 'fibre to the home' connections in the UK was zero, compared to 46,000 in the Slovak republic, 900,000 in the US and almost 8m in Japan.

The BSG is the government's advisory group on broadband and its chief executive Antony Walker pointed out that the length of time it takes to deploy new networks meant that, "unless we start answering some of these big questions there is a risk that we will suffer in the future."

The summit will, "consider the circumstances that might trigger public sector intervention, the form that intervention might take and at what level it might sensibly take place," according to Timms. The summit is scheduled to take place before the end of the year, said Timms.

BSG chairman Kip Meek, speaking at the same event called on the government, to "set a target benchmarking the UK’s broadband infrastructure against its key economic competitors."

However, Ovum's broadband technologies analyst Jonathan Coham has reservations about the government's strategy, "I think the general theme of the statement deviates from the important issues. Why we should invest govt funds into fibre access simply because everyone else is doing it (France, Germany and the Netherlands) is surprising."