Election results day a good day to bury bad news — who’d have thought it? Fortunately for people living in rural areas, the bad news wasn’t buried as well as the government might have hoped: it turns out the Conservatives have changed their tune a little on their plans to roll out decent levels of broadband across the country by the end of this parliament. 95% of homes will receive superfast broadband by he end of this year. But around a million homes — mainly in rural areas — will not be receiving superfast broadband, and for those who have poor broadband service, its ‘Universal Service Obligation’ will require homes and businesses in the 5 per cent of areas that don’t yet have fast broadband to request the service.
It could take until 2020 for the connection to arrive – and it’s unclear how it will be funded – with Ed Vaizey admitting that ‘there might be an element where individuals would have to contribute’ (i.e. pay – why don’t you just say it, Ed?) in order to receive a broadband speed of 10 MB per second – which counts as ‘fast’.
But what’s most irritating is that the government are hiding behind the excuse that ‘it is unlikely that everyone will want to be connected’. Who are these people who ‘don’t want’ to be connected to broadband? The reality is that the government have suddenly realised that what they’ve promised would actually prove pretty costly. So why don’t they just say that? Claiming that they’re failing to deliver because people in rural areas don’t want good broadband is, to be frank, utter rubbish.
12 per cent of Britain’s GDP comes from online businesses. Many rural businesses – because of their remoteness – depend on the internet even more than urban ones. There have been numerous government plans to computerise farm payment schemes and be done with paper forms – all of which have gone tits up, which doesn’t say much for the government’s IT systems. But if people can’t access decent internet, how can these IT schemes possibly be expected to work? In some places in Gloucestershire, the broadband speed is lower than that at Everest base camp – and it would take a whole week to download one film. So much for Netflix.
It’s bad enough that the Conservative government are doing so little to help people living in the countryside – though it’s hardly surprising. It’s even worse that they won’t admit their failings.
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