Over the last 5 years the telecoms market have shown how effective and vigorous competition can deliver investment, innovation and economic growth. The UK has gone from being a laggard to a leader in broadband, with a world-leading combination of attractive services, real choice, low prices and high take-up.

There are still many important issues within the broadband and telecoms market and here we discuss what we think of some of the hottest topics of the moment.

TalkTalk continues to be at the forefront of building our nation’s digital future. We have invested over £500 million in rolling out our Next Generation Network and installing our own advanced equipment in more than 2,000 of the UK’s local telephone exchanges. Our network now reaches around 86% of the country’s homes and we will continue to invest in expanding this network, massively increasing its capacity and developing new services such as IPTV with YouView.

We support the Government's goal of getting the 1.5 million homes that can’t get 2Mbps to this minimum level. At this stage we believe that the policy focus must be on enabling the private sector and the market to deliver a cost competitive and efficient rollout, as well as getting more UK citizens using the internet.

Whilst the internet is ultimately a force for good, there are risks which need to be addressed, especially with regard to children. We believe that parents should be able to easily choose to block certain forms of content. Without effective parental controls, children will be unnecessarily exposed to inappropriate content.

Earlier this year TalkTalk launched the UK’s first network-level parental controls service, HomeSafe. Exclusively available to TalkTalk customers free of charge, HomeSafe protects all devices using the internet connection in the home including games consoles and smart phones. Whilst there is no silver bullet when it comes to internet safety, we do believe that HomeSafe is a simple and effective way to empower parents to better protect their children online, allowing them to quickly and easily take great control of how the internet is used in their homes. You can find out more about TalkTalk’s work on child internet safety here.

The Digital Economy Act 2010 included measures to attempt to reduce illegal file sharing and thereby support Britain’s creative industries. It gained Royal Assent following the wash-up in the final days of the last Parliament.

The Act requires Internet Service Providers to send letters to customers whose connections have allegedly been used for illegal file sharing. However in most cases the subscriber will have not broken the law themselves because several individuals can use each connection. The only redress for these falsely accused subscribers would be an appeal.

TalkTalk agree that protecting copyright is important but it cannot be done at any cost – it must be done in a way that protects consumers’ most basic rights to only be punished if they have broken the law and to have a backstop judicial process to protect them that is based on a presumption of innocence. We led a consumer rights campaign ‘Don’t’ Disconnect Us’ last year to highlight these issues.

We supported much of the cross-party approach to creating a Digital Britain in the last parliament and we welcome the current Government’s commitment to making the UK a more digitally inclusive nation.

TalkTalk was one of the early partners of Race Online 2012 and supports the vision of Martha Lane Fox, the UK Digital Champion, of getting as many people online as possible. There are nine million people in the UK who have never been online, and over four million of those are socially excluded due to age, unemployment or income. Not only is this group missing out on the financial and educational opportunities that the internet offers, but they will become increasingly more isolated as more services move online. You can read more about our work to help communities to bridge the digital divide here.