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Press Release 8 June 2004: Measuring the breadth of Broadband Britain
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“Look at the detail – only 14% of households have higher speed connections and only half of UK households in total have internet access” says Lindsey Annison, a community network builder and member of the Access to Broadband Campaign’s executive; “Let’s not kid ourselves – we have a long way to go to meet the Government’s 2005 targets.”
ABC argues that the raw numbers hide an important flaw – “Although this report shows a step in the right direction, until people can be shown to be using broadband bandwidth for more than a bit of e-mail or web surfing, these figures are of limited value in proving that the Britain is even close to achieving the target of being the most competitive broadband market.”
ABC argues that we need to look at what people with broadband actually do with it. It is only by using broadband to communicate, whether through files, video, audio or telephony that the full potential of broadband can be achieved. ABC believes that Ofcom needs to look at new ways of measuring broadband and that the UK needs a ‘best network’ metric – most data moved at least cost. “Bench-marking of this metric across the confusing landscape of competing products, and across other economies would be a better way of judging where the UK is in the broadband league table” says Annison.
For further information on ABC: www.abcampaign.org.uk
For additional information, please contact:
Richard Rymill – ABC Office: ABC-office@rapidresponsemarketing.co.uk 01937 541 553
Lindsey Annison – 07967 670759
or Brian Condon CEO ABC 07785 525861
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It was interesting to note the Net use today after the shenanigans in the BB house last night. Channel 4's site was crawlingly slow and often giving 504's, Digital Spy had to put up an apology for the overload on their servers, and I'm sure many other sites were suffering in a similar manner. The congestion in certain areas of the network was intense because there were far, far too many people queuing for the limited number of loos with a dire urge to evacuate. Worse still, they were shouting over the partitions between the loos, and dashing from one loo to another just to satisfy their urges, which made it even more imperative for those waiting to cross their legs!!!
Not normally a Big Brother fan except for watching the use of interactive and broadband applications it encourages more than probably any other single content provider at the mo, the heavy usage was unmissable and I noticed that several people had uploaded video files of the events to their own servers, which were taken down in moments - presumably they scared the life out of the hosting companies with such high demand (a few hefty bills will be issued !!! These files were not much more than a few minutes of the footage, and were up to 700Mb files. A mere CD's worth really but far too many people couldn't access them on their dial ups and were therefore relying on shortened versions and narrative to bring them up to speed. Even those on ADSL were saying that 700Mbps would eat into their day (a few even admitted they were supposed to be working!).
I'm sure the Govt would love to find something in E-gov which would capture the imagination of the public so much that the network was put under strain in such a way. Sadly, the only times this sort of attention is given to politics are tragedies such as Madrid or 9/11. And this I think is massively important.
The applications which lead to mass usage are in place now. Video footage of events that people are desperate not to miss already puts the network under strain, and highlights the inadequacy of the sewage system in our country currently called broadband.