The disparity in UK broadband speeds is more than an irritant. It means yet again we slip behind our competitors overseas
Don’t live in a “not-spot” where super-speed broadband does not go. For 20 years we have been happy users of Virgin but over Christmas learned it was all up. Virgin decided that customers like us in a not-spot were commercially valueless, so we were cut loose. A cherished email address is no more.
We are tiny casualties in a much larger new pattern of inequalities and unfairnesses unleashed by digitisation. (These don’t follow the usual geography of inequality – the densest area of not-spots is in the rich City of London.) Last week uSwitch published a survey of the variability of internet download speeds around the country, revealing an extraordinary patchwork quilt varying from not-spots to speeds at the frontier of current technology.
Continue reading...