'Super-fast broadband' in UK homes by 2017 - Tories

The Conservatives have unveiled plans to deliver a "nationwide super-fast broadband", part of which could be funded from the BBC licence fee.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne said a Tory government would deliver speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) to the "majority" of homes by 2017.

He said cabling in rural areas could be paid for by private investors or by part of the licence fee.

But Labour said the Tories had opposed plans to improve broadband.

The government has set a target that homes should have access to speeds of 2Mbps by 2012.

'Thousands of jobs'

Mr Osborne told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show: "In the 19th Century we built the railways. In the 20th Century we built the motorways.

"In the 21st Century let's build the super-fast broadband network that will create hundreds of thousands of jobs for Britain."

The Tories said money from private investors would pay for better cabling.

But it was added that it might not be attractive for private companies to install broadband cabling in some rural areas, in which case a proportion of the BBC licence fee could be used.

The Conservatives said the BBC could continue to set aside 3.5% of its licence fee - which currently goes to the digital switchover - to fund broadband expansion.

For Labour, Treasury Minister Stephen Timms said: "On broadband it's not Britain but the Tories that are playing catch-up.

"Labour have already announced measures for rolling out broadband across the country - and the Tories have opposed the plans to make that happen. "

'Fantasy economics'

The Liberal Democrats accused the Tories of operating "fantasy world economics".

"Anyone can promise the earth - what matters is how you pay for it," culture, media and sport spokesman Don Foster said.

"All independent research shows that the market simply cannot provide high-speed broadband in all parts of the country in the short term without investment.

"Hints that the license fee payer will be hit are the closest the Tories come to explaining how they intend to pay for this."

A government report on the UK's digital future - dubbed Digital Britain - was published in June 2009.

The action plan included universal access to broadband by 2012.

The wide-ranging report also tackled internet regulation and public service broadcasting.

The rise of the web's digital elites

Ahead of a major series on the BBC about the impact of the web, presenter, social scientist and journalist Aleks Krotoski asks whether the web has already missed its greatest chance.

The web is an extraordinary innovation, with the greatest potential to usher in social change since the invention of the printing press or the steam engine.

Built upon a technology that is apolitical, unregulated and decentralised, it empowers everyone - men, women, children - to be creators of information, rather than passive consumers.

It is also an enormous library of global consciousness, a digital collection of human knowledge from the past and the present and presented in an easy-to-access format.

As a result, we now have the unprecedented power to create our own truth, and share it with everyone in the world. It has ushered in an equality of access that we have never seen before.

But has its potential as a great leveller for the whole world already passed?

'Utopian society'

Twenty years ago, the web was colonised by a group of early adopters who believed that the ideal society was equal - every person had a right to get involved, there should be no hierarchy, and rules would be mutually determined for the common good.

People like American writer Stewart Brand, critic Howard Rheingold, and the Grateful Dead's John Perry Barlow believed the sanctity of the individual was superior to that of the nation state, and that contact with people from across the globe would be enough to solve the world's ills.

Howard Rheingold was an early adopter of the web

These people, many of whom we tracked down for the series in the idealistic haven of San Francisco, had spent more than a decade playing around with alternative, non-physical communities in cyberspace on the proto-internet.

The early communities they established, like the online forum the Well had parallels with other Free Towns in the "real" world, many of which had suffered when the reality of poorly-defined regulations degenerated into exploitation and lawlessness.

But the idealistic web pioneers maintained that the new digital frontier would provide a fertile, intellectual ground on which to create a freer, utopian society.

But as we found as we were speaking to many of these pioneers, history has had a different plan for the web.

The pioneers' loose approach to social behaviour online has clashed with the essential features of our nature - our desire to take control, to own and to profit.

Implicit inequalities emerged early, but once the Web became a space for commercial gain in the mid-1990s and its population exploded, being at the top of the pile - translated as holding the first position in Google's search results - became the benchmark for offline financial returns.

The exponential increase in content on the web during the late 1990s and throughout the last decade has meant that reliable, trustworthy and credible information is increasingly difficult to pin down.

Net hope

At an individual level, we rely on friends and family for what to trust and what to believe, but we also look to experts and other people with high social status to point us in the right direction.

Tim Berners-Lee on the road in Ghana

Jimmy Wales, founder of the online-user generated encyclopaedia Wikipedia, admits that despite being the current poster child of information levelling, Wikipedia has explicit hierarchies that determine whose knowledge is more worthy than others'.

It seems that, for all its talk as a great leveller, the web is as unequal as we are.

Indeed, what we social scientists are discovering when we observe the web as a platform of social interaction is that, despite the medium, human beings seek hierarchies to help us make sense of our world.

It turns out that this is as relevant online as offline. After all, we can only bring to this digital tabula rasa what we already know and what we have gained from our existing experiences.

Despite this, people like former US Vice-President Al Gore is an online optimist.

When we spoke with him, he insisted that the global nature of the world wide web has the potential to change this, as different societies bring their different perspectives to bear on the web community.

Human medium

Indeed, when I joined the inventor of the web - Tim Berner's Lee - in Ghana as he was travelling to remote villages to try to understand what could happen when the African continent, parts of which have only recently been physically connected to the rest of the web with high-speed broadband access, makes its contribution to the international dialogue.

The author believes the web is a reflection of humanity

However, what I realised on this trip is that the imprint that most people in the African states will develop in their first experiences of the web will be based on what non-Africans have created.

Our two decades of shaping this maturing technology his has led us to a tool that has been crafted in our image.

When the Virtual Revolution team went to Abiriw, a rural village in the mountains outside Ghana's capital Accra, I was struck by how the kids in the local community centre used the web - they saw the world of information through the window of Google.

The search engine works on a principle of the "madness" or "wisdom" of crowds, basing its results on which websites receive the most links to their pages.

The majority of the crowd to date has been non-Africans, and so the window that these kids are using for information is non-African. What kind of dogma does that transmit?

And how does this reinforce the inequalities that exist between the developed and the developing world?

Ultimately, the web is a reflection of humanity, not a humanity-changer. We bring to it all of our other human foibles, warts and all.

The US virtual economy is set to make billions

Paying real money for products that do not exist is big business

Virtual goods such as weapons or digital bottles of champagne traded in the US could be worth up to $5bn in the next five years, experts predict.

In Asia, sales are already around the $5bn mark and rapidly growing.

For many, virtual goods are one of the hottest trends in technology and are fuelling huge growth in the social gaming sector.

"This is just an exploding part of the gaming business right now, said venture capitalist Jeremy Liew.

"It is the most exciting area in gaming," he said.

Mr Liew, whose firm Lightspeed Venture Partners has invested $10m in virtual goods companies, said the rapid growth of the sector was unprecedented.

"We have seen companies go from nothing in the last 18-24 months to tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue."

Revenue model

Playfish is a social gaming company that started two years ago. Today it has 11 online games and more than 61 million people who play those games worldwide.

Playfish believes virtual goods will continue to lead to more riches

Crucial to its success is the sale of virtual goods, ranging from furniture for your pet to menu items for your own restaurant in games like Pet Society and Restaurant City.

"Virtual items within the Playfish games are the centre point of the way in which Playfish derives its revenue," Tom Sarris of the firm told BBC News.

"We have two different revenue models. The primary is the sale of virtual goods and the second is in-game advertising, but that is a very minor aspect at this stage."

Mr Sarris would not reveal how much Playfish makes from the sale of virtual goods, but admitted that it accounts for the lion's share of the company's revenue.

That, according to Mr Liew is fairly typical.

"Virtual goods is the whole story in the world of social games. It accounts for 90-95% of revenue for a lot of these social game developers."

The new gamers

And it is not just the stereotypical gamers that are spending their hard earned cash on goods that only add up to a handful of pixels on a website

Emma Cox is probably fairly typical of the new breed of social gamer who plays as a way to stay connected to friends and family.

Ms Cox buys virtual goods to get ahead in the game

"I am not a traditional gamer. I don't buy console games or go out and spend $40 on a game for my PlayStation," said Ms Cox.

"I am playing online games for a different reason and it's instant gratification, playing with friends, showing off to others and have them see all the virtual goods you have bought for yourself and even for them."

Ms Cox told the BBC she spends about $10 a month per game on virtual goods and plays two to three games. Her favourite is Country Store where players trade real money for coins allowing players to move ahead in the game or to buy goods.

The game bills itself as an opportunity to let players get away from the hustle and bustle of life by hanging out in the country tending crops and breathing the country air.

On her last visit, Ms Cox bought fertiliser and seeds for corn and peppers.

"These virtual goods are easy to buy, they are accessible, they are online," said Ms Cox.

"The immediate impact is being able to move throughout the game a lot more quickly. It also enhances your overall experience of the game - it is about total entertainment."

Playfish's Mr Sarris said that is the main reason people are willing to purchase products that do not exist.

"The way we look at it is it's no different from paying money to go and see a movie or rent a dvd. What you are paying for is the experience and that notion of entertainment."

Social is key

Central to the early growth of this virtual goods revolution have been social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

Ten of the top 15 apps on Facebook are social games

Users of these networks can also pay for virtual goods, such as digital birthday cards, champagne or flowers.

"Increasingly as people's relationships migrate online, your interactions occur there," said Lightspeed's Mr Liew.

"That makes it more natural for those acknowledgements of how important someone is to us to occur there also. Buying something like virtual champagne or a birthday card is telling someone they are important to you."

However most of the momentum in this virtual goods market happens through social games which Mr Liew said is responsible for bringing a new type of new gamer to the fore.

"We have found tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people playing these social games and many would never consider themselves as gamers. Yet they spend real money to play these games and in some cases really meaningful amounts of money.

"That is what makes the expansion of this market so exciting," added Mr Liew.

Bright future

The market is clearly one with a lot of life in it.

About two thirds of the top 15 applications on Facebook are games, according to analytics firm AppData. Those ten games are said to draw more than 100 million users a month.

Mr Liew said the virtual goods revolution will remain big news in 2010

Earlier in December, one of the biggest social gaming companies, Zynga, sold a stake in the firm to Russia's Digital Sky Technologies for $180m (£113m).

And in November, Electronic Arts, agreed to buy Playfish in a $400m deal (£251m).

Proof of how successful the virtual goods business has become is evident in moves by Facebook itself to test a payment system to get a cut each time an online-game player buys a digital tractor or pair of flip flops.

"We are still in the growth stage of this industry," said Mr Liew.

"We are still seeing people come out of nowhere and become a leading player. Five years down the line, it will become more stable with five to ten companies becoming more valuable.

"The virtual goods industry is one of the most exciting categories of 2009 and will remain an exciting category in 2010," he added.