{"id":2458,"date":"2009-01-15T13:41:46","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T13:41:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2009\/01\/digital_britain\/"},"modified":"2009-01-15T13:41:46","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T13:41:46","slug":"digital_britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/digital_britain\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most interesting documents likely to be published in the UK in the next few months is Lord Stephen Carter&#8217;s Digital Britain report. The draft report is due to be published by the end of this month, and it&#8217;s likely to cover things like public service, broadband and digital radio. The recent DRWG report has been passed to Lord Carter&#8217;s team.<br \/>\nBut the leaks are starting now. Today&#8217;s FT has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/0\/1708dce6-e27e-11dd-b1dd-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1\">a report<\/a> that details what is likely to be the highest profile element of his report: universal broadband access.<br \/>\nCurrently 40% of households don&#8217;t have broadband access, and after years of growth, the increase has slowed.<br \/>\nThe Digital Britain report proposes that every household in the UK should have access to at least 2 megabits per second download speed. This would be either via fixed wires, or via wireless 3G technology in rural areas.<br \/>\nWhat isn&#8217;t clear from the FT&#8217;s reports is how this would be funded, and how much it would cost householders. If 40% of homes have yet to subscribe to broadband, many are obviously in areas that <I>can<\/I> receive broadband currently. So are they not subscribing because it&#8217;s too expensive? Or do they not have PCs? There&#8217;s not really a &#8220;pay as you go&#8221; broadband offering &#8211; you&#8217;re generally tied into 12 month contracts which some find either unaffordable or otherwise unviable. And of course, not everyone owns a PC or other device that would make use of the internet.<br \/>\nWithout universal access to the internet, we are already becoming a two-tiered society. So giving access to all is important.<br \/>\nMore on Digital Britain once the draft report is published, including much about radio&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the most interesting documents likely to be published in the UK in the next few months is Lord Stephen Carter&#8217;s Digital Britain report. The draft report is due to be published by the end of this month, and it&#8217;s likely to cover things like public service, broadband and digital radio. The recent DRWG [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,10,9],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}