The IT Pro Podcast: What does Labour's broadband bonanza mean for business?

With the UK gripped by election fever, the country’s politicians are all fighting to win the support of voters - and the Labour party has come out swinging with a bold new proposal to provide free superfast broadband to all UK premises. 

In this episode of the IT Pro Podcast, we speak to IT Pro’s resident public sector expert Keumars Afifi-Sabet to find out how this attention-grabbing idea is going to work in practice, as well as looking at how realistic Labour’s cost and timeline estimates are and the potential impact on businesses across the country.

We also look at the findings of the report into TSB’s catastrophic outage last year and ask if the company could have done more to prevent it, as well as revisiting the ongoing sparring match between Xerox and HP Inc. NB: This week’s episode was recorded prior to the news that Xerox is doubling down on its acquisition offer by threatening a share buyout. 

Footnotes

News

• TSB’s IT disaster pinned on ‘big bang’ approach to migration
• TSB outage: CEO Paul Pester quits after IT meltdown
• HP rebuffs Xerox takeover bid

In-depth

• Labour pledges free broadband through Openreach nationalisation
• CBI director: Labour’s free broadband plans born of "extreme ideology"
• Why did the government’s 2025 full-fibre dream fail?
• BT claims PM's 2025 full fibre pledge will cost £30bn
• ‘Too many hurdles’ for 2025 full-fibre pledge despite fresh £5bn injection
• Should you make the jump to gigabit internet?

Subscribe

• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Apple Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Google Podcasts
• Subscribe to The IT Pro Podcast on Spotify
• Subscribe to the IT Pro newsletter
• Subscribe to IT Pro 20/20