As the Conservatives fire the next round in the vote for me and I’ll get you faster Broadband, it looks like it set to become an important Election issue, just as getting the Banks better regulated, determining what is spent on Defence and what we do with our dwindling energy resources are. It’s all about better national infrastructure planning and no government has really done that properly since WW II.
It’s very clear to me that ‘The Market’ (okay it can’t help that much with defence) cannot do this by itself, look at the mess we face with meeting our energy needs – no commercial company will build the national infrastructure needed for the next generation and successive governments have abdicated their responsibly of doing it for short term populist gains.
The same is true for Broad Band. We have known for a number of years that more of everyday life is moving ‘online’ and with a current government promoting more and more of this through its many ‘citizen’ portals – Direct.gov is but one example – giving full and speedy access to all these platforms ‘is’ the governments responsibility.
An earlier post showed a good example of the lack of joined up thinking by this government. If you create legislation for farming that requires daily data to be uploaded from farms, then you have to build the infrastructure to support that across the whole of the UK not just urban and city -scapes, unless of course you move all the farms into the cities to give them a good connection!
No individual commercial company is going to ‘wire’ the UK for free and why should they. More importantly, why do they need to when we already have a national infrastructure practically covering the whole of the UK and particularly rural areas – yes the BT network.
Over the years BT has I think done a good job of building a better network and delivering good broadband speed (no I don’t work for them), but without (as far as I know) any large government funding/assistance specifically aimed at Broadband infrastructure. As a commercial company, yes they have had to be forced to open up their network to competing providers, but that is not a bad thing as it has helped drive down the overall costs to the end user – I know it has done that in my case and yes we now have more choice. But of course if government doesn’t ‘encourage’ BT with direct funding, even they will not upgrade all the UK exchanges to deliver the so called minimum 2MB target talked about by Labour.
Perhaps the BT national network infrastructure needs to be hived off and run as a separate concern providing a fully government funded/assisted ‘standard’ platform for all UK Broadband ISP’s. Nationalised? PPP? Something in between? Not sure. What I do know is that something needs to be done (not just talked about) quickly or the UK will slip further down the various league tables and any advantage that we think we have, will be further eradicated.
Again, yes it is an important election issue, but so are the UK power resources, you can have the best super fast broadband in the world, but if you cannot power your router up, what’s the point.
Some Broadband speed info results from friends around the UK. Reading: BT-5.5 MB (Me), Richmond: Virgin-10.5MB, Montgomery: BT-4.3MB, Manchester: Talk Talk-2.3MB
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