No 3D TV on demand for any of you

SECOND CLASS telly viewers will be a term the great British public will get to know in the next few years thanks to the coming gap between the promises of connected TV's and the broadband people actually have to deliver web TV.

The promise of Connected TV is a utopian vision of telly entertainment in High Definition (HD) and 3D, and even in ye olde Youtube 360p if you must, anytime, and almost anywhere. With true telly on demand, viewers will no longer be slaves to the linearity of those broadcast schedules that everyone purchased the Radio Times to peruse.

It's a future that won't need to be a hard sell to a population that now has HD capable tellies and has found that the standard definition terrestrial digital channels, care of Freeview, are not delivering the best picture.

While four HD Freeview channels have been launched, two from the BBC, one for ITV and one for Channel 4, the spectrum for the digital service is never going to support many more. Not much of an entertainment return on those hundreds of pounds shelled out for a box that would deliver an allegedly fantastic viewing experience. And Freeview doesn't provide that interactivity and freedom of viewing choice that Connected TV is expected to offer.

There is a similar situation with British Sky Broadcasting. It can boast over 50 HD channels but even its satellite broadcast will hit a spectrum limit in channels, especially when 3D programming comes along in large numbers. The problem is all the channels have to be broadcast at once, there is no way of interacting with the satellite and asking for just one.

Telly via the Internet, known as Connected TV or Internet Protocol TV, would seem to be the answer. Shove the requested TV channels down the tube would seem to overcome spectrum limitations of terrestrial broadcast. Everybody has a phone, everybody has an Internet connection.

Telly addicts use a tiny fraction of the available connection to request a channel and that is then fed to the screen. However if users want to record another channel and, or pipe a third or fourth channel into other rooms in the house then the bandwidth demands are going to be, well, demanding.

Today British Telecom (BT) is publicising its 1Gbps over fibre broadband trial and recently Virgin Media has made some noise about its 100Mbps plans. The purpose of the BT technical trial is to demonstrate the maximum speed capabilities of BT's Fibre-to-the-Premise (FTTP) product. That speed could be downstream data rates of 1Gbps and upstream speeds of 400Mbps to businesses and consumers, "subject to the appropriate network conditions and customer equipment" of course. But these claims, even with qualification, can only raise hopes that are bound to be dashed.

Despite the 1Gbps BT trial planned for 2011 in rural Kesgrave in Suffolk the harsh reality is the vast majority of the country has a bandwidth of far less than 10Mbps and the obstacles to improving that are high.

Less than 10Mbps means users can not even get High Definition at 1080p, which really needs a minimum of 10Mb to be streamed.

Virgin Media has made much of the 20Mb and 40Mb claims of its competitors and the fact that what users actually get can be substantially less. The company even backed a campaign about the gap in delivery but seemed to forget that its own 10Mb, 20Mb and 50Mb services don't necessarily deliver exactly those bandwidths all the time. Virgin company has its own 100Mbps trial ongoing but it is not clear over what period such a service would be rolled out to customers.

Virgin Media uses the cable network it inherited from NTL Telewest. While this has a lot of coverage of urban areas vast swathes of the UK have nothing. Don't look for cable in Cornwall or much of Wales or the northern reaches of East Anglia even. BT is rolling out fibre broadband to two thirds of the UK by 2015 and talking of running fibre over telephone poles to reach the remaining third but so far all the talk is qualified with the need for government support.

To date Digital Britain has been a debate about Internet access and what low bandwidth means for equality of information access but the pitchforks and torches could emerge when the great unwashed realise that they are second class citizens that can't get their Coronation Street opium when and where they want it unlike the urban elite.

As if the abandonment of Labour's digital Britain policy by the Conservative Liberal Democrat coalition government wasn't a big enough signal that bandwidth poverty was coming to much of Britain the pitiful figures now being bandied about can only confirm that observation.

The coalition government has "indicated", according to BT, that it will make £830 million available over the course of "this parliament and the next" for extending fibre coverage. That is a decade. A parliament is five years as the coalition has committed itself to fixed terms of office. How much of this indicated £830 million will come before or after 2010 is anyone's guess.

BT helpfully tells us that if it "were...to win funds on that scale, the company's initial estimates suggest that, with supplementary funding, it could extend fibre to up to 90 per cent of UK premises."

Of course BT has no hopes of being given funds on that scale by government and neither has Virgin Media. Funds on that scale may be split between the two but neither are going to get that sort of handout.

None of this is stopping the Connected TV capable set top box and Blu-ray player manufacturers. They are already churning out products for Sony TV and the Boxee Box and planning to deliver Youview and Google TV set top boxes next year.

As well as ever greater broadband claims, the UK public will be bombarded next year with the Connected TV utopian vision. They need to be reminded it is going to be a mirage. µ