The UK’s ICT infrastructure is better than much of the rest of the world’s, but connectivity is badly distributed throughout the country. Whilst London and the southeast generally have fast internet access, some of the outlying regions and rural areas are still stuck with the old telephone network’s copper cables for their infrastructure. Consequently speeds can be down to the ‘dial up’ rates of a decade or more back. Next generation access involves enhancing these phone networks – which were never intended to support high-bandwidth internet traffic – to fibre-optic cables which are capable of transmitting enormous volumes of data very quickly. The problem is that such upgrades are costly, and companies are not always able to make the investment. However, this means that whole areas can be stuck with slow internet access. Given the significance of the web for business, personal communication and life in general today, this is problematic. One solution is community broadband.

Community broadband is a way of drawing groups of people together and sharing connections between them. These are locally-organised movements aimed at addressing ‘not spots’ – those areas that today have little or no connectivity. They are often administrated by social enterprises or not-for-profit groups and are therefore cost-effective. There have already been some exceptional success stories, with tens or hundreds of thousands of people in some places connected to the high-speed web. This obviously comes with many benefits, not least that e-commerce now accounts for a non-trivial amount of GDP; good internet access is viewed as a prerequisite for the economic recovery which is currently elusive.

Communications technology is fast-moving. Only a few years ago it was almost inconceivable to browse the internet on a smartphone – the mobile phone revolution is itself less than 20 years old. Whilst this makes some organisations (and individuals) wary about upgrading – the new technology may fast become obsolete itself – it also means that those without next generation access are being left behind, reliant on phone wiring that were never intended to handle the load that is currently demanded of them. The UK’s ICT infrastructure is patchy, and large areas – particularly remote places – have very slow access. Community broadband is a way of addressing this and bringing equality of speed to the country. This will be fundamental both to economic recovery and addressing the north/south divide in terms of web access.

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