Britain’s government pledged Tuesday to supply universal access to broadband World Wide Web connections as part of a plan to spur the country’s technology sector and boost the economy.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Tuesday that high-speed Web access has become as “indispensable as electricity, gas and water” for most of the public.

“Just as the bridges, roads and railways built in the 19th century were the foundations of an Industrial Revolution that helped Britain to become the workshop of the world, so investment now in the info and communications industries can underpin our emergence from recession,” he wrote in an op-ed piece for the Times of London.

Brown’s comments came ahead of the release of the government’s “Digital Britain” report, which was expected to propose major investments aimed at giving every home broadband access and propose policies aimed at developing new jobs in the info and communications industries.

by 70 percent of British adults now have

some profile of access to the World Wide Web at home but authorities want to reach those who are reluctant to get online — either considering they cannot afford it or considering they do not feel they benefit from it.

Broadband access in Britain is patchy and many households in rural areas can only access the Net through slow or unreliable connections that cannot be used to watch movies, shop online or access other services that would be useful to citizens living far from larger towns.

The government now wants to ensure every household can have broadband access at 2 megabytes per second — fast adequate to use the Net to buy products online and use social networking sites like Facebook.

Britain is not the only country to try to expand Web access. Germany announced a similar plan in December, as part of its first economic stimulus package. India’s President Pratibha Patil recently…

Original post by dhiram