Broadband goes political
By Alexis • Mar 16th, 2010 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: Stock.Xchng
The Conservatives have vowed to provide faster broadband speeds, targeting 100mbps with their technology manifesto. This is the latest in a string of political maneuverings showing how important the Internet and broadband technology has become in digital Britain, so much so that it is central to an election campaign.
The manifesto
This technology manifesto outlines the thoughts Conservatives have regarding technology, partly to increase broadband speeds and to make government information more readily available. The funding for this project will be provided by the ‘private sector’ as opposed to a system akin to the very controversial 50p broadband tax levy, or so claim the Tories.
The faceoff
- Photo: Cisco
This is simply a case of the Tories trying to one-up Labour. Where Labour promised universal broadband at a minimum of 2mbps, Tories’ digital Britain strategy promises 100mbps, a 50 times multiple of the Labour promise, but to most people.
The payoff
The grand payoff for the political parties is to get the votes. That’s their end game. Whether or not they fulfill these promises once in power is far from a certainty. For consumers, and broadband providers, both of these initiatives by the Tories and Labour are positive, because more broadband is good. For manufacturers of networking and routing technology companies like Netgear and Cisco, it means a bigger marketplace to sell their products to, which is also positive.
Now what?
- Photo: Netgear
There is very little in the way of negative externalities with the government adopting such a positive outlook on technology. To the extent that Singapore, South Korea and other countries have left the United Kingdom in their dust with regards to broadband speed, it is encouraging that the British government wants to close this gap. But given dynamics like Britain’s many rural areas and sparse population density, the deploying of this super speed broadband is not merely a case of turning it on. Achieving digital Britain is nowhere near as simple as technology manifestos would have one believe.
