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Is the UK the “behind’ of connectivity?

By Brian Kingston

dbfb Communications

OBVIOUSLY I would not mean posterior, or rear end, or anything like that, although on the world stage of internet speeds we may qualify for a description along those lines.

72 per cent of the UK workforce use the internet, communicating with customers, tracking sales, trading with suppliers, doing accounts and a plethora of other things too numerous to mention. Business literally cannot operate without it. So why, according to a recent study, are we wasting the entire GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of Mozambique due to slow and dropped connections? (That’s 11 billion pounds by the way).

The answer is not “in the soil’, nor is it “done by mirrors’, but because we, as a nation, were one of the first to install telecommunications networks through one company. We therefore now suffer from 20th century mentality, and even some government departments still think that copper is best.

Copper mixed with tin moved ancient civilisation from stone to bronze but they later realised that iron was better. How long must it be before we all use fibre, not FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) linked to our homes and businesses by, you guessed it, copper. But fibre all the way from exchange to our properties.

Superfast connectivity let’s say 76mbps (megabits per second), which is quicker than most of us have today, would take four hours and 23 minutes to download 150GB (Giga Bytes) of memory (I have that on a laptop, videos, photographs, music, email and I do not have any games!). But if I had Ultra-Fast, 1000mbps, which I do in the office, hooray! Then I can back up my whole system in just the 23 minutes. Forget the four hours!

So, if one in five of us are disillusioned, dissatisfied and totally fed up with our internet speed, which I am led to believe we are. If 78 per cent of company directors firmly believe that it would improve productivity, which they do, how long will it take us to move from copper, back in the day mixed with tin to make bronze, not to iron, but to fibre and move into the 21st century already 17 years old!

Let’s hope we are quicker than our ancient ancestors!

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