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.

Universal broadband could "change face of Britian as we know it"

Universally available high speed Internet connectivity would redistribute Britian's population and alter its economy, according to a study reported today by Sky News.

The report also revealed that UK businesses could save up to £31.7bn, if more people were able to work from home.Robert Ainger, Orange's director of corporate business said: "The long-entrenched domination of the South East in Britain's economic structure could at last be coming to a close, with many workers wanting to trade their city lives to work from more rural and idyllic parts of the country."Our report reveals that a digitally connected country could change the face of Britain as we know it."

The findings could have even larger implications for the United States as advanced telecommunications infrastructure is more widely built out.

Socio-economist Jack Lessinger predicted in his 1991 book Penturbia: Where Real Estate Will Boom After the Crash of Suburbia that Americans would emigrate from large metro area suburbs for smaller towns outside of metro areas. Around the same time, early proponents of telecommuting or telework -- your blogger among them -- began to see how telecommunications could fuel the trend that same way freeways fed the surburban boom immediately following World War II.

British broadband deployment strategy stuck in the self limiting box of DSL

When it comes to ensuring universal broadband access for its citizens, the biggest challenge facing the Brits is thinking outside of box of DSL as this Telegraph story today illustrates.

The UK government is bumbling by setting the bar way too low (prescribing a minimum download speed of 2Mbs) and basing its broadband deployment strategy on DSL over copper, a technology intended to serve only as an interim solution from the 1990s and to the middle of the current decade until fiber optic to the premises is build out. It's a vastly underpowered and arguably obsolete technology that itself is responsible for the formation of gaping broadband "black spots" as they are called in Britian. That's because DSL signals attenuate and quickly fade not far from central telephone exchanges, meaning those just a few miles away are left without service.

Our friends across the Big Pond should consult with American broadband experts like Tim Nulty, who is working to bring fiber to the premises in that part of the U.S. known -- ironically -- as New England. Nulty served as director of a publicly owned broadband system serving the city of Burlington, Vermont and now runs ValleyFiber, a nonprofit organization focused on bringing municipal fiber to nearly two dozen Vermont towns.