The Government’s new Secretary of State for Business, Greg Clark, seems to have gone off-message after he told an annual conference for the Institute of Directors (IoD) that the United Kingdom’s mobile and broadband connectivity was in a “simply unacceptable” state for 2016.
Normally it’s the job of every government MP to verbally extol the perceived benefits of the national Broadband Delivery UK programme at every opportunity. The scheme has so far helped to lift the coverage of “superfast broadband” (24-30Mbps+) from c.70% of the UK a few years ago, to 91% today and hopefully 95% by the end of 2017 (possibly 97%+ by 2019). Likewise the coverage of 4G mobile has also improved dramatically, albeit more due to commercial investment.
None of this is to say that we shouldn’t perhaps be investing more, as well as setting some much more ambitious targets for our national connectivity, or that BDUK is perfect, which it isn’t. Never the less you do generally expect that Government ministers, especially those that have been presiding over the country for nearly 7 years, might prefer to praise rather than trash what is effectively a market of their own making. It seems somebody didn’t get the memo.
Greg Clark, Secretary of State for Business, said:
“For too long, government policy has treated every place as if they were identical. It seems to me that helping Cornwall make the best of its future is as vital to a comprehensive national success as helping Birmingham – but what is needed in each place is different, and our strategy must reflect that.
Many of the policies and decisions that form our industrial strategy will not be about particular industries or sectors, but will be cross-cutting. For us to succeed in the future we need to have the right infrastructure – roads, rail, broadband and mobile – that can connect businesses to their workforce.
…
We have new infrastructure like Crossrail about to open, but we have roads that are bottlenecked, trains overcrowded and broadband and mobile coverage that is simply unacceptable in 2016.”
We’ll leave the debate about whether or not today’s broadband and mobile coverage is “simply unacceptable in 2016” to our readers. In fairness Greg Clark was talking to a very business connectivity focused organisation and in that sense he is somewhat pandering to the crowd’s well documented concerns (here), albeit without offering a clear path towards improvement.
Certainly we suspect that the provisions of the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill 2016-17, which among other things include measures to help the roll-out of digital infrastructure and foster a 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO) for broadband, probably won’t be enough to placate an organisation that seeks universal 10Gbps broadband by 2030.
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