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UK Delays National Broadband For Three Years
DMandPenfold writes "The British government has said that it will not be able to complete the rollout of broadband across the UK until 2015, blaming a lack of funds. 'Under the previous Labour government's original plans, everyone in the UK would have had access to 2 megabits per second broadband by 2012.' On Thursday, UK Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt organized a meeting for major broadband providers 'to identify the current barriers to providing basic level broadband in rural areas as well as suggesting ways to make more use of publicly-owned networks, such as those connecting schools and hospitals.' BT, the country's biggest telco, estimates that the necessary government funding for the project will be as much as £2 billion."
"BT, the country's biggest telco, estimates that the necessary government funding for the project will be as much as £2 billion."
This is a farce. What the new Government did was ask the TELCOs what the problems were with deploying rural broadband. That's like asking De Beers how to reduce diamond prices.
Even in my remote town in the middle of nowhere, we now have access to 12 megabits per second for commercial clients.
You haven't said anything about the price - or what drives your local economy.
"Remote" doesn't always mean poor or politically impotent.
Makes me sick. BT should pay for it, they already have a monopoly, so you can't avoid paying them money. Why can they not pay for this themselves? They have stiffled innovation for years. They promised 21CN for the whole country and I don't believe they ever had any intention of delivering it.
I have nothing against my neighbors wanting a "free," quality, public education for their children, but why should I have to fund it?
(Never mind that my children have already gone through the public school system and are off to college now.)
I thought we understood that governments build infrastructure on the premise that we all benefit in one way or another. Roads, airports, shipping ports, military, etc. Otherwise I could extend your argument to include all those other things and more. I may never drive on the Trans-Alaska highway, fly out of Portland, Maine international airport, but I do believe that by making things better for the people who do use them, we've all receive a benefit. Likewise for me, for the things I use.
And that free public education my children received? If I'd had to pay "the going rate" every year they were in school, I could never have afforded it, so now I'm paying for it in installments through my town or county property tax (or your council tax), and my neighbors will be doing the same, and if not here, where ever I live, or they live. If you look at the big picture it all evens out, more or less.
Why? C is extremely terse, and therefore ideally suited to dial-up.
Now if you were a COBOL programmer, you'd have a point.
SCNR
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We'll be hearing this from the Tory-Lib Dem government for the next 4-5 years, I suspect. There will be many many things that we should be doing, but because Labour mismanaged the public purse, the digital divide in the UK will have to stay.
It's really quite boring that politicians spend so much of their first time blaming the previous incumbents for current problems, instead of being a bit more proactive and concentrating on solutions instead of laying blame...
cat:
You want all the neat stuff you need to actually live in a heavy urban area delivered to you from the rural areas, plus have it cheap. Swell, this is now possible because as a nation we invested in a set of "commons", we now have decent roads everywhere, rail service, and seized property where electric transmission lines, natural gas lines and water lines exist..all to bring stuff to you in the cities, our royal "blues" bloods now by voting demographics, cheaply. So, if the rural people just want a little better internet, all of a sudden this "commons" idea gets bad? OK, maybe it is! How about you voluntarily give up all your cheap trucked in stuff and piped in stuff and go out and start contracting for your food and water and electricity, and pay transit fees and tolls, boundary line by boundary line, to each owner, to all the rural landowners to get that stuff? What do you think your urban existence would really cost then?
I'm all for it really, dump the commons, privatize everything including the roads, no more eminent domain seizure and use for the transmission towers and water pipelines, toll roads everywhere, all of that, let it simmer for a few months, just to see what is really valuable today or not. Let's rock! Bring it on, we'll see who cracks first.
Here, just to show you we rural people have some compassion for our now starving urban area "neighbors" under the "chuck you farley, we got ours now you pay up what we demand if you want anything better like normal 21st century stuff" private everything model of society and economics... you might need this http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/e-sermons/butcher.html You need to print out a hard copy now while you can..my guess is your electricity would go to, oh..a few hundred bucks a kilowatt hour at a minimum once all our transit fees are paid to us. Maybe more..or maybe we just wouldn't care and say "no, tough luck, we don't need anything you have, including your scam fiat currency crap. We could do that, too. We got the food, water and energy, you got...consumers. That's it..you just consume what we provide, and provide cheap.
Have fun! Let's do it, the grand experiment, get this sorted out what is really worth what, once and for all. Then no more debates, we'll all know what is necessary and what isn't, who gets paid too much and who gets paid too little, and what is more important, and whether or not a "commons" is a good idea. Let's let a real free market and no more public commons *anything* sort this all out. I'm totally ready and would really like to see it. Making my bucket of popcorn right now!