Can Mobile Broadband Solve the UK Digital Divide?

MJackson writes "Lord Carter's interim Digital Britain report recently proposed a new Universal Service Obligation (USO), which would effectively make it mandatory for every household in the UK to have access to a broadband service capable of 2Mbps by 2012. Since then there has been much talk about Mobile Broadband (3G, 4G) services being used to bridge the UK Digital Divide, but is that realistic? The technology has all sorts of problems from slow speeds and high latency to blocking VoIP, MSN Instant Messaging and aggressive image compression ... not to mention connection stability."

Comments

Re:USO sounds like a really great plan

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Isn't that the same reason America has no standard nuclear power plant design? Unlike France and Canada which have safe and plentiful nuclear power plants based on a standard design, America's nuke plants are always built using the "latest and greatest".

Which means, of course, that they are also very expensive to build and operate.

What are their motivations?

[roc97007]

I was somewhat of a geek in high school back in the 1970's, and one part of George Orwell's 1984 struck me as extremely unlikely, verging on impossible -- that the television (some kind of flat screen bolted to the wall, as I recall) that every citizen was required to have would also double as a surveillance device, giving Big Brother (that term seems so quaint these days) the opportunity to keep tabs on the rank and file. I thought, even if you could mass-produce the hardware at some reasonable cost (bear in mind this was 1972), there's just not enough bandwidth in the world to accomplish this.

Well, now there is. And the first step of such a system would be to insure that the infrastructure was in place.