The budget delivered by Alistair Darling last week was extremely important for businesses looking to ensure their future prosperity as the promise of universal high speed broadband was essentially pledged.

The new 50p Broadband Tax has been confirmed and this comes almost simultaneously with the new Building Britain’s Digital Future initiative, in which prime minister Gordon Brown committed to getting high speed broadband to 100 per cent of the population in the next decade. Business leaders can only hope that future governments are able to live up to this promise.

Thankfully it looks as though most businesses are being backed by local and national plans to help bring broadband to as many people as possible, but for many there is little clear idea as to what kind of timescale they will be looking at before the promise of universal high speed broadband becomes a reality.

At the moment, the 2017 deadline for 90 per cent high speed broadband coverage is looking attainable, but there are no official figures relating to how much the public or private purse will have to pay in order to ensure that the final 10 per cent is not left floating in the wind.

The nations that currently top the charts in terms of high speed broadband availability, including Korea and Japan, could only achieve market saturation with heavy investment from the authorities, which suggests that relying entirely on the private sector for the cash is not going to work in Britain.

It is believed that if high speed BT business broadband packages become widely available within the next decade, working from home will be far more common and the morning commute for those who do head into work will be less crowded as broadband enables more diverse working patterns.