Digital television is being helped to grow at a faster rate in the UK than anywhere else in the world by Bradford hi-tech firm Pace Micro Technology.

Figures show that in Britain, 25 per cent of the population have access to digital television compared to less than 20 per cent in the USA. The two countries top the world league table for take-up of digital TV.

And Pace, based in Salts Mill, Saltaire, puts this down to the competition between a large range of service providers based in the UK.

A spokeswoman for Pace said: "There is a very healthy market for digital television in the UK so lots of people are wanting set-top boxes.

"One of the reasons for the speed of growth is that such a lot is happening and there are so many companies competing for customers. Our market is dynamic at the moment and we are working at full capacity and are on the lookout for an extra 60 engineers this year."

The firm employs more than 1,000 people and has links with 80 countries around the world.

Britain has five digital television service providers with ONDigital, Sky, Cable & Wireless, Kingston and Telewest - owners of Bradford-based Yorkshire Cable. Soon Huddersfield-based NTL will be added to their ranks.

And ON Digital's plans to boost its subscribers to a million by the end of the year is also good news for Pace which produces its set-top boxes.

The company, jointly owned by Carlton Communications and Granada Group, said its subscriber number hit 673,000 by the end of the March. ONDigital said it was confident of reaching one million subscribers by the end of this year and two million by the end of 2002.

ONDigital has added 121,000 subscribers in the first three months of this year.

Rival digital provider BSkyB announced earlier this month that it had added 935,000 digital subscribers since the end of 1999.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.