Friday, October 09, 2009

Prince Charles warns of UK "broadband deserts"

The UK's broadband "not spots" are getting royal attention from the Prince of Wales. The BBC today reported Prince Charles wrote the Daily Telegraph to point out that "Too many rural households are currently unable to access the internet at satisfactory speeds."

As the Brits would say, Charles used rather extraordinary language to condemn the situation, calling the lack of investment in modern telecommunications infrastructure "vandalism on a grand scale" of rural economies.

From my perspective from across the Big Pond and on the other side of the North American continent, it seems a big contributor is inside the box thinking among our British friends. They appear stuck in the publicly switched voice telephone over copper network paradigm that can only deliver DSL -- and only so far. Instead, they and the rest of us need to be thinking in terms of advanced, second generation telecommunications over fiber to the premises delivering multiple digital services that copper was never designed to accommodate.

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