Digital Britain – what again!

29 Jan 2009

Just a quick rant (well more like a rant-let), I have just been reading about the new plans for ‘Digital Britain’, and guess what, they are remarkably like the last set of plans, these being; get the country to adopt broadband and move services to this connected country wide network.

Isn’t that what we have been doing? Isn’t this evolution, where technology creep is seen in the real world? Did it really take all those consultants and all thoses millions to arrive at this?

The killer is, they actually think it’s new! and no one has commented yet on the fact that all that has been announced

is another round of questions, still needing the same old answers;

What are we going to do to implement a faster infrastructure? Most probably requiring a country wide fibre network, as the copper wire is just not up to the next generation of development.

Who is going to pay? and how is the end user going to get charged?

How are we going to guarantee access in rural areas?

OK, it’s good that this issue has got a higher profile and therefore could attract some funding, let’s just hope it’s spent on delivery, of the solution, (it’s not that difficult, we do know what is required), and not spent on more consultants and consultations!

I heard a really interesting statistic on the radio this afternoon, one of the goals for the new Digital network is to obtain an average broadband speed, for the UK, of greater than 2Mbs, just so you know, this is currently in excess of 3Mbs right now! Don’t shoot too high chaps…….