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by theblackbox
5968 days ago
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Worth noting: We had something quite inspirational up in the Lakeland fells recently. One villiage (Alston Moor[1]) was so sick of constantly being set back by ISPs, that they organised a community action group to lay their own fibre optic cable during some planned roadworks. Everyone pitched in, cloudsourced infrastructure if you will, and with just enough people they look set to have 100Mb broadband before a lot of places. The guys who got it off the ground set up www.cybermoor.org and are encouraging similar grass roots development for other remote areas. I like that. [1:http://www.cybermoor.org/index.php?option=com_mtree&task...] |
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It's arguably far more important to get good internet access to rural areas than to inner cities. If you're in Central London or Manchester, you can quite easily shop, meet others in your field of work, network, be entertained without touching a computer if you don't want to.
Meanwhile in remote areas, it's not so easy to pop out and do these things and the internet has been a huge leap forward - but we're being held-back by spotty, slow, distinctly iffy internet connections that just aren't capable of sustaining meaningful economic activity. The advent of the internet is a huge chance to revive rural communities which have been in decline for years now.
But while BT, Google and other companies concentrate their high-speed efforts exclusively on profitable inner-city areas which already have a plethora of other options, we're in serious danger of leaving "forgotten" rural areas behind. I have friends on a Scottish island which currently only has 512kbps on its exchange...