Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2009 7:32 pm
When I was living in Guisborough, I helped my neighbour connect his computer to the 'net using dial-up. After a few weeks, I asked him how he was getting on. He said "Fine", so I asked him if he'd thought about getting broadband installed. He paused for a second and then said "No, I really don't need it. I e-mail my son in Texas and browse some model railway websites, and that's about it."DaddyHoggy wrote:I think possibly as one of the few people who has actually read the digital britain report I can safely say that 2Mbit/s minimum that Gordon has set out as the bare minimum is never going to happen, not by any method laid out in the report anyway.
I thought about Terry, my former neighbour, as Ben Bradshaw unveiled the Digital Britain report and announced that everyone was going to have £6/year added to their phone bill to go to a fund that would pay for remote areas to get online. Terry didn't want to pay for his own broadband, but the government were going to make him pay for someone else's.
One other interesting fact that amazed me... I'd assumed that when a new housing development is built in the UK, all of the properties would be connected to the local exchange using fibre optic, so I asked the telephone engineer who visited me if this was the case. "No" he said, "nobody wants to pay to have that kind of gear installed". "So brand new houses are connected to the exchange using copper wire?" I asked with some amazement. "Yep".
By comparison, new properties that are built near to an exchange in France come with a 24Mbit broadband connection.
