Any UK entries for the Gigabit Challenge?

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Google's Gigabit Fibre (and no, I'm not spelling it the wrong way, thanks, I'm British!) has triggered the Gigabit Challenge, looking for disruptive and unique applications / business ideas that could use the capacity and network. I know we're all stuck on dire internet connections here in the UK that stifle our imagination, effectiveness, productivity, etc etc, but we must be able to come up with a few entries?!
This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



The rules seem pretty simple. You don't have to buy anything, just register and upload your idea with supporting material.

Business Plans will be evaluated on the following:

• Ability to clearly and completely convince the judges that a real market opportunity exists and that they have the right combination of product/service, team, and plan to generate significant expected financial returns from that opportunity given the amount of risk associated with the opportunity. 
• Growth & impact: Demonstration of potential for being in business in five years and how the business will impact the local economy (e.g., generating revenue, creating jobs).
• Brevity & clarity: Business plan presented clearly and concisely, and is easy to understand
• Entrants must show how their venture ties into the strengths and assets of the Goggle Fiber Network and/or how being connected to the Google Fiber Network will create a beneficial relationship within the Kansas City metropolitan region.

Now, I don't know much about Kansas beyond that film, but communities are pretty much the same worldwide, urban or rural. 

9 days left before the deadline...thinking hats on folks!!

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FTTH - don't call it 'broadband'

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Read more! Whilst I was in the States, I was told over and over again, "Don't call it 'broadband'- it's FTTH". The point being that what has been manipulated by telco marketing departments to be a meaningless nothing about speed, contention, services available etc (broadband) cannot hold a candle to what we are all aiming for.

I know there are 101 arguments for FiWi, or I would never have coined the term in the first place, but the reality is that what we are looking to do is not improve a struggling infrastructure incrementally, but go for a major step change instead.

I have just received two articles which bear reading on this matter. Dave Brunnen of Groupe Intellex has been playing with the concept that "This is not an upgrade". In "Comparatively Crazy", Dave explores why we need to stop looking at all of this with an olde school thinking cap on, and instead we need to get disruptive.

In the run-up to the election, we want to see brave politicans tackling the heart of the problem, not taking baby steps away from the old towards the new. In the first year of another new decade, we want to see progress with discarding 100 year old infrastructure and accepting that the time has come to stop allowing the copper cabals (as @cyberdoyle calls them) to run the show that is our lives and business on the Internet, digitally connected age.

If Internet access is deemed to be a human right as the BBC's recent global poll shows, then we need to consider how to ensure that this becomes reality. I personally would add to the question in the poll by saying that what is required is not access to the Internet per se, but access to a communications network which permits us to do many of the things which Dave Brunnen points out in his articles are now possible, plus access to all of the opportunities which are up and coming.
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