22% of the UK don't want your fancy high-speed internet
I remember when broadband first became available in the UK. I begged my parents to upgrade our slow, slow AOL dial-up internet access, so I could download bigger files and actually be competitive in online games (it was some years later when I discovered my poor performance was not solely attached to my slow connection). No avail, they were happy with AOL, which is a sentence you don’t see very often these days.
Regardless, they have (or had, rather – they got broadband pretty sharpish as soon as I’d left for university) quite a lot in common with 24% of the UK, who also don’t see the point in this high speed internet malarkey. That’s according to OFCOM’s CEO Ed Richards, who made the claim in a speech to the London School of Economics.
Doing some quick figures, he estimated that 40% of the UK is still in the technological dark ages of dial up or (gasp) without internet altogether. Yet, only 15% of this figure is thanks to expense with 55% not wanting it at all despite the exciting draw of YouTube and iPlayer.
No clue as to what the remaining 30% think. Perhaps they spoiled their ballot paper.
Still, this is a challenge that needs to be tackled, according to Richards, if the UK is to meet its target of Digital Britain, with everyone in the UK connected to broadband of a minimum 2Mbps speed. If the rest of the UK remains as stubbon as my parents were in the summer of 2001, they may face an uphill struggle.
Alan Martin
(via TechRadar)
