Ofcom Digital Divide Conclusion
The BBC is reporting the digital divide is lessening between rural and town communities and is even going so far as to say the “Rural Homes Dominate Broadband UK”
They report:
Ed Richards, Ofcom’s Chief Executive, said “Our report highlights a closing of the geographical digital divide in the UK. Rural households are today as well connected to broadband as their urban neighbours”..
Declan Curry of BBC Breakfast reported the release of the latest Ofcom report that is the trigger for the BBC news article. Our own John A Thomson sent in a comment that was read out in part online and we’ll expand upon these thoughts in this blog post. Thank you Declan.
Roundtrip Solutions, as a rural IT provider, uses and services both the rural and town communities of Fife. Our real world experience of typical broadband users of all denomination, geographies and providers gives us a real insight to the current state of play regarding broadband. What we do see on the front line isn’t necessarily the same as Ofcom’s interpretation of the higher rural take-up figures, performance levels and satisfaction ratings!
Let’s use a metaphor to describe the feeling of many rural broadband users:
The technologies of today, and more especially those coming in the future, will see broadband services supplied in towns running like formula one cars while the rural community relies on a horse and cart.
The share of homes getting broadband in the cities and rural areas isn’t the crux of the digital divide debate; this was the big problem some four or five years ago. The real issue has moved on as many people in rural areas struggle to get the fastest speeds available today due to their distance from the exchange, the age and quality of their telephone line, and the BT technology level available in their local exchange. Even when BT has rolled out their 21CN network (next generation), the last mile (the connection from the exchange to the home) in rural areas is liable to still be the same copper telephone lines that we have today.
Tim Hubbard, Head of 21CN Technology Futures for BT, gave a presentation to the Edinburgh branch of the British Computer Society in January 2008. He presented the vision for the next generation BT network during which it became evident that the last mile connection was liable to remain the same, especially so in rural areas where it is uneconomic to replace. John A Thomson of Roundtrip Solutions even questioned him on this very matter during the Q&A, resulting in the admission that without government subsidies then it is unlikely that BT would replace the last mile in rural areas.
There is a PPT presentation and an MP3 podcast available on the Edinburgh BCS website.
From an end users point of view, the town users will be able to access fast and faster broadband services as BT upgrades all elements of the telecommunications system, while the poorly serviced rural customers will look on in jealous amazement at the services available to them. To add to the teasing, the rural customers will have a local exchange with the latest generation broadband available, but they won’t be able to utilise it due to the “piece of [copper] string” connecting their home to the exchange.
The debate today is clouded by those people on a connection supplied by the big boy providers who have a sub standard service that cannot meet the demands of their customers especially at peak times.This is mainly down to the overselling of their services matched against the capacity they have in their networks. There are some very good broadband providers out there that supply very good experiences and decent speeds, but the next generation broadband services that rely on super fast broadband (24Mbps and above) will still be unavailable to rural customers simply due to the existing BT telephony infrastructure not being up to the job – specifically, the last mile.
We see many customers complaining about their broadband that are made extremely happy when they are migrated to a good supplier. If you would like to find out more about getting high speed broadband with UK based support at a reasonable monthly charge then please Contact Us.
Technorati Tags: BBC, broadband, BT, Declan Curry, digital divide, last mile, rural broadband
