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.