Gagging to invest
I can't see many companies rushing to provide incredibly fast broadband at affordable speeds in rural areas; looks a little unlikely. They'll just have to fob off the country folk with a resumption of fox hunting instead.
Even in the cities, a lot of firms will probably prefer to try and get a free (or wholesale price) ride on the back of BT, rather than actually go to the considerable cost of digging up streets, especially given other noises from political types, including tories, about ending the free-for-all that sees the same street dug up over and over by different companies. That laudable aim - to those of us who like our tarmac not to be serially molested - is at odd with ensuring there's little regulation to stop all these generous capitalists building out wonderful network. So, not much joined up thinking there.
Arguably, of course, you could blame Thatcher if you wanted, at least to a degree. All the buggering about with BT for the last 30 or so years stopped them rolling out faster networks when they wanted to, and now that the government wants them too do it for the national good, they find they'd also have to let other people reap the benefits of their investment, because apparently that's the right soft of interference in the market.
On the face of it, this seems like a pie in the sky policy that more or less amounts to "We'll promise something that sounds 50x better than labour, with less tax, and we'll take a bit of money from the nasty old BBC." Someone probably thought that was a nice triple whammy of tory goodness.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
