Wednesday, June 17, 2009

UK Digital Britain Report

The UK government has published its Digital Britain report along with an Impact Statement. These are extensive reports. The Executive Summary by itself makes 83 separate points. There are a couple of significant things that I saw:
  • It wants to increase the households that can access broadband at 2 Mbps from under 90 percent to 100 percent. It expects that wireless will be important in accomplishing this. It expects to make 200 million pounds available to support this goal. It also encourages the allocation of new spectrum for this purpose.
  • It encourages the deployment next generation fixed broadband, which it defines at 50 Mbps by example.
This is not an ambitious set of goals. A number of other European countries have much more aggressive programs, including France, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries. It does not come close to matching what is going on in Asia, especially Japan, Korea, and China.

Following this plan will keep the UK at the back of the pack. At least it will be in good company along with those of us in the U.S.
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1 comment:

devonseaglass said...

Politicians in the UK are not flavour of the month at the moment. With the credit crunch leading to unemployment at its highest for over a decade, a national debt that will cripple the economy for the next decade, MPs fiddling expenses and, now to top it all, a hair-brained 'plan' to bail out a privatised monopoly from early death by asking taxpayers to fund its next generation broadband rollout. Time to get Iranian!

June 17, 2009 at 11:19 AM

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