Chancellor Alistair Darling’s pledge of £250m to help Britain achieve universal broadband might sound like progress – but it’s practically an admission that rural areas will never get high-speed fibre connections.

The amount of money on the table is derisory. BT is spending £1.5 billion on bringing fibre-to-the-cabinet to 10 million homes across the country, and BT is (so far) concentrating on urban areas where deployment costs are lower. Does the Government really think it can bring even 2Mbit/sec broadband to the whole of Britain on a sixth of the budget?

Actually, no, it doesn’t. The Chancellor’s woolly Budget report claims that “If necessary, the cost would also be met through additional funding mechanisms, as set out in the Digital Britain Interim Report.” In other words, fixed and mobile broadband providers will be expected to foot the bill. But as Communications Minister Lord Carter told The Telegraph earlier this week, “there will certainly be 25-30% of the country where there will be no economic case for building a next-generation fixed network”.

While the unambitious target of 2Mbits/sec is hardly the “next-generation” network Carter refers to, it’s clear that the Government has already given up on high-speed networks in rural areas, and will settle for connection speeds that aren’t even fast enough to run the HD streams from the BBC iPlayer in vast chunks of the country.

Is that really a massive problem? It most certainly is, because as Carter concedes in that same Telegraph interview “in less than 10 years, we will be in a complete ‘on demand’ television world.” Except for those who haven’t got the broadband speeds to cope, of course.

“Lord Carter talks of a video-centric world,” argues Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, president of the Country Land and Business Association.  “In reality we have a world where social and economic deprivation is growing because of a lack of access to fast internet connections.

“The economy is being divided because many rural businesses simply cannot compete with their urban rivals. School classes are split because of some children’s inability to do set homework online. Communities are being divided because people are seeking to move to a home that has broadband.”

Digital Britain? Only if you live in the right parts of it.