Broadband Not-Spots
31 March 2009
Broadband Not-Spots & Water Supplies in Rural Wales
The Communications Consumer Panel has commissioned deliberative research into consumers' and citizens' views on the importance of access to broadband facilities. I was extremely interested in this question as it relates to communities in rural Wales, where broadband connections are unreliable, speeds are poor, and in places non-existent. I asked if I could sit in one of the research sessions, and went to one held in Carmarthen in South-West Wales, where some highly articulate and well-informed active people had been assembled from near a small village called Pumpsaint (Welsh for 5 saints). This area has no broadband, and it also has little or no mobile coverage, very poor terrestrial TV coverage, and no digital radio.
The first surprise was that nearly everyone in the group was very conscious indeed of what they were missing out on by not having broadband - I had vaguely expected that ignorance might be bliss - but it was very clear that this was wrong - they were able to rattle off a very long list off the many servces and applications that broadband would open up for them. My heart went out to the gentleman who is a tax consultant who has to send in on-line tax returns for his clients. This is a completely impossible exercise on a rather unreliable dial-up link which always seemed to time-out at the critical moment, so he has to prepare them all on paper and then go once a week into the Library in Carmarthen (about 15 miles) to complete them on-line.
When asked to say which applications/services were most important to them, the group found it hard to single out any single application as being more valuable than another - they understood that access was the key, and that they definitely wanted the whole package, from e-mailing family photographs to renewing their road tax discs. They regarded it as having a potentially profound effect on their quality of life. They described using dial-up as "confidence-sapping" - a real inhibitor for older people and those not used to using computers.
There was a huge sense of injustice and inequity throughout the group that they couldn't join in with modern life through lack of what, they felt, should be a universally available facility.
In terms of how important broadband is relative to other utilities, they were unanimous in putting it ahead of mobile coverage, gas (they don't have that anyway), and even terrestrial TV. Some even put it ahead of mains water! (This shocked the researcher, until they pointed out that many of them have their own springs). One or two people volunteered the information that if broadband didn't come soon, they would even feel obliged to abandon the rural idyll and move house. And given the beauty of that area - that would be a real wrench.
A final thought: hearing them talk about the trials and frustrations of dial-up brought back memories of not so long ago when all most of us had was dial-up, and the explosion in applications over the last few years means that we feel we couldn't survive if we had to go back to 28.8 kbps or whatever we had. So will the 2Mbps envisaged in Digtal Britain's programme be seen as adequate by 2012? Personally I doubt it.