A report that was released to the media early last week from Brunel University's Broadband Research Centre claims not that demand, nor pricing, nor saturation is the answer to the cries by many for a truely Broadband Britain, but VoIP technology is.

Comparing Blighty with the Japanese market, the B3RC are keen to point out the ability to make inexpensive or even free phone calls has become the 'killer application' in Japan and a number of ISPs - notably Yahoo Broadband - offer a bundled IP telephony and broadband service.

VoIP in the UK is just begining to take it's first steps towards being a technology that could be taken seriously by residential customers - but is it too early to be classing it as a main driver for pushing development and availability of broadband throughout the UK ?

In the mainstream, the technology still has yet to achieve a call quality that people are used to using the traditional telephone system, and asking consumers to invest in broadband facilities and VoIP hardware, all to achieve reduced call costs, might be asking just a bit too much given the standard of call quality.