Britain becoming nation of internet shopkeepers

The e-revolution races on.

Britain's Office for National Statistics has produced new estimates for the value of UK internet sales by businesses in 2005, suggesting that they rose by 56 per cent on 2004 to reach £105bn.

Much of this, nearly £73bn, was business-to-business rather than sales to individuals, but both are rising fast.

To put this in context, total GDP last year was £1,200bn, so we are talking about nearly 9 per cent of the economy being online.

That was last year; the proportion will be higher now.

A second bit of new info came from the OECD.

It estimates broadband access every six months and its figures for the middle of this year show that, among the Group of Seven, the UK is now second after Canada for broadband penetration.

We are even ahead of the US as well as Japan, Germany, France and Italy.

Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Korea lead the global table.

In Denmark, nearly 30 per cent of the population has access to broadband, compared with a little under 20 per cent in the UK.

Still, there is some evidence that commercial use of the internet here is running even higher than in Scandinavia: around 70 per cent of Britons buy something online at least once a year, more than anywhere else in Europe.

So it would seem the UK has caught up with the US and most of the Continent in use of the internet.

The next issue will be speed, for the coming revolution is the optical-fibre one, with some countries now rolling out fibre to office and apartment buildings and even directly into homes.

When that becomes the norm, speeds can shoot up, so it becomes possible to deliver TV-quality streaming video or even high-definition video over the internet.

That is probably the stage where the full convergence of the television and the computer is achieved.

Perhaps the most interesting thing here is that an apparent lead in access to technology does not necessarily mean a corresponding lead in applications.

Korea did the fastest roll-out of broadband, but it was the US that gave us Google and YouTube.

- INDEPENDENT