News 

In a thinly-veiled dig at BT, Murdoch claims his company plans to keep driving down the price, and increasing the speed of broadband. "Our focus is on delivering good things for customers, and ultimately we think that really matters - from a regulatory perspective as well," he tells the Financial Times.

"When we say we're going to go and challenge some of these big incumbent telecoms operators who've been charging too much for too little, for

ADVERTISEMENT

way too long, we think that's good for customers."

Murdoch says that broadband speeds will inevitably continue to increase. "Only a few years ago people were talking about 1Mb/sec or 2Mb/sec as 'superfast' broadband, and today we're talking about 16Mb/sec, 24Mb/sec, and some people are talking about 50Mb/sec," he says.

"This innovation happens quickly, and it's been growing a lot in the past, so to imagine that it stops here is wrong."

"There's no question that the big trend here is that we'll see more bandwidth demanded, and I think that's a good thing for the satellite infrastructure as well as for the kind of LLU [Local Loop Unbundling] infrastructure that we've built," he says.

However, he casts doubt over whether broadband will have the speed to cope with services such as television-on-demand. "In terms of simultaneously consumed media, a high-definition sports broadcast, etc, it's going to be much more efficient to distribute that via satellite than it is through a broadband network for a long time," he says.