What Does 21st Century Broadband Mean?
The UK is in the midst of developing its strategy for so-called “21st century” broadband connections to people’s homes. What do you think that should mean in terms of bandwidth? 100Mbps? 1Gbps? I’d say it should mean 1Gbps; that is, one gigabit per second, or around 200 times faster than the home broadband connections that most people have today.
Apparently, though, the UK simply can’t afford the cost of putting in the core infrastructure that would allow companies to provide this kind of broadband in the future. That’s nonsense of course - the UK can easily afford it. It’s just that there is neither any political will or any deep understanding surrounding this subject in the top levels of government.
The cost to bring fibre to 90% of UK homes is estimated to be around ten billion pounds. How to pay for this? Well, in the future, home broadband connections will be as important as road networks are today. This kind of infrastructure needs to be publicly funded. A large proportion of the cash could come simply from forcing those responsible for putting on the 2012 London Olympics to stick to their original budget (or, if they can’t do that, let another country host the games in 2012). Or, it could come from scrapping the proposed new UK ID card scheme; it’s a scheme which won’t work, and serves no useful purpose, so it would hardly be missed.
That’s not going to happen though. So, what will the UK actually be stuck with for it’s so-called 21 century broadband? The answer, I’m afraid, is laughable. UK homes will be have rather pathetic “up to” 24Mbp Internet connections. If people are lucky, that means they might have connections that are three times faster than those they have today. If they’re unlucky, they won’t see any improvements at all. Surely that isn’t the best the UK can do…
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