about 150 years ago Joseph Bazalgette was asked to create a sewer network for the burgeoning metropolis of London. It was a lucky choice of designer. In those days London was a vast scattering of interconnected villages, not the urban sprawl that it is now.  Bazalgette, however, did not simply base his 1,100-mile-long sewer system on existing demand. Instead, he calculated the required capacity by working out demand in the areas of densest population and then applying that across all of London once the villages had been "infilled". Then, just to be on the safe side, he doubled it.  Had Bazalgette not foreseen future needs, the system would have collapsed long ago. as it is, his system is still in use today. His foresight, and that of the municipal leaders who drove this innovation in London and our other great cities, created the basis for modern Britain. The safe development of our cities, with the building of canals, railways and roads, created the enormous markets and industrial powerhouses that made Britain the manufacturing capital of the world for almost a century.  Today we face a similarly great challenge. Britain is trailing the world in digital infrastructure, the fibreoptic network that supports fast broadband. Next year South Korea will have one-gigabit broadband direct to every home - ten times the speed of the most ambitious British plans. as it stands, only 0.2 per cent of UK households have a superfast broadband connection, compared with 34 per cent in Japan. Two million UK households cannot get a broadband connection of at least 2 Mbps, the minimum required for full internet functionality. More remote parts of the country, such as Cumbria, are littered with "notspots", which have no broadband service at all.  Why does this matter? Well, broadband is more than a technology, it is a whole modern marketplace. It is not just useful to techno geeks. The small pine furniture manufacturer in a remote village in my constituency, the young woman who designs and sells handbags, the wildlife photographer who sells pictures online: all depend on the internet for their customers.  Broadband can transform how we work: high-quality teleconferencing means managers do not have to commute every day, reducing traffic congestion and carbon emissions. Broadband can benefit healthcare in rural areas too. Remote medical technology will soon allow doctors to give patients diagnoses online, allowing the elderly to remain at home rather than travelling miles to a surgery.  Britain is fantastically talented at digital content, from video games to music, and a new broadband network would be a huge boost for this growing part of the economy, which now generates ?130 billion every year and employs 1.7 million people. Fast broadband will deliver between 280,000 and 600,000 new jobs; lack of it will undermine our competitiveness.  That's why we must create a national, superfast broadband network that takes fibreoptic cable to every front door in Britain. at the moment, the Government intends to direct about ?530 million from the BBC licence fee to enable BT to invest ?5 billion in laying cable to about 60 per cent of the population, mainly in urban areas. This is not enough. There is already a digital divide between rural and urban Britain. There is a real risk that superfast broadband will be an exclusively urban luxury and that rural households and businesses will be left farther behind.  But the ?25 billion cost of making superfast broadband available nationwide is more than the Government can afford and more than the ponderous, monopolistic companies i