The Battle of Broadband Britain drags on

You could be forgiven for thinking we've witnessed a lull in the fighting in the UK's broadband access war. It was never going to last.

Redstone Telecom has just returned from the front as the latest casualty. This pioneer of SDSL (meaning fast data rates in both directions) in the UK is one of the few companies silicon.com has been consistently nice about.

Now, with half the board gone and shares being given away in cereal packets, the company will refocus on other areas of its business. We hope that Redstone survives, even if the 'telecom' bit is being amputated in a change of name to reflect a scaling back of its broadband business.

There's more bad news. ADSL provider and ISP Easynet is merging with backbone network vendor Ipsaris. It's not the end of its ADSL project but it is safe to assume that Easynet was finding it hard to survive in the broadband business, and local loop services will drop down the agenda of the merged company.

In the heavy battalions, Freeserve has had to put its prices up, and BT Openworld may well do so soon. Running up massive debts may have been BT policy a while ago, but things are changing on that score.

You know things are bad when you start writing 'Oftel to the rescue...'. They've been in the news too, with a few pathetic measures to improve the situation. Suffice it to say they're simple, sensible measures that should all have been put in place two years ago. All they do now is highlight how bad things are getting.

It's a shambles and a disgrace, and it's turning into a massacre.

Oftel may take so long to get BT in order that we never get proper, cheap DSL in this country. Some peacekeeping force. We may have to put up with second-rate broadband for the next five years, stifling the growth of ebusinesses, large, medium and small.

Fibre optic, broadband fixed wireless, cable modem and, who knows, perhaps even satellite may fill the gap. But British companies could have been leaders in broadband, not casualties of an unnecessary war with BT.