Economic evidence from US

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Read more! Recent studies estimate that accelerating broadband deployment in the US would have a total annual economic impact of $134 billion. Additional economic impacts show the potential for a further $130 billion across healthcare, education, job creation and retention, environmental impact etc.

This has led to a lobby of a broad-based alliance (healthcare, farming, education, telcos etc) to urge Congress to adopt a national policy for broadband mapping, public=private -partnerships for deployment and more. The full article is available here.

The UK needs to move forwards along these lines too. Mapping existing infrastructure that can be used more effectively (ducts, poles and masts for instance), deployment, notspots, and determinning where there are going to be gaps and underserved areas, where public-private-co-operative partnerships could be the best solution.

In order to do this correctly though, there needs to be clear definitions of the services available, as per the post yesterday about defining NGA/broadband to ensure that further digital divides are not created through misunderstandings and lack of clarity. Read more!

FTTH and death

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Read more! I've had a bit of a week with my 'best friend' dying. And I just can't work out how FTTH fits in...

Would 'life' be better if everything was held in some sort of FTTH type filing system? Not really. Would FTTH have made this last few days better? Nope. Could FTTH have solved any of the medical probs? No.

The truth is, that because all of this has happened in a small, rural community, NOTHING can work as fast as our jungle drums work with current technology. And those techs have been diesel engines, mobile phones, land lines and seeing/talking to people in real life.

Nothing works as fast as an ambulance crew who know the 35 mile road to the hospital. Nothing works as well as a nursing system who can CARE for the patient. Nothing can cope with the fact that someone didn't write a will, nor the fact that the family are amazing. Nothing works as fast as the acceptance that no current govt system can work as fast as 'people power'.

In fact, it has become ever clearer this week that sometimes, you don't need technology, policy, regulation etc. What you need is good common sense and humanity.

And when the community spirit makes up for "We can't tell the police where the ambulance picked him up under Data protection laws", so the community goes out to find the car, the keys, the access into the 'life' of the dead person for his family, etc, and then you realise we may have gone overboard in our policies.

This is quite a complex tale but not so complex for the local people with no tech whatsoever, but a little word of mouth, to solve issues which seemingly left family in the hospital entirely unaware of the location of the incident, the circumstances of the incident, the personal belongings of the victim etc. Due to POLICY and REGULATIONS.

I have been horrified by the events this week, though relieved by the community's capacity to resolve them. Once again this is a situation where a rural community has resolved issues DESPITE government intervention rather than BECAUSE of it.

This is constant. Agencies fiddle whilst the country burns.






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