I spend a lot of time talking about the Broadband Stimulus Bills, which is the US government’s plan to get households without broadband online at relatively decent speeds. The British equivalent of this would be the Digital Britain Report. While the Report does not propose as detailed of an implementation method, it does state that every household in the UK should have a connection of at least 2 Mbps downstream by 2012. A private UK company known as Freerunner is working to help make this a reality. With the help of advertising and corporate subsidies, Freerunner will set up wireless networks in towns without broadband. The towns will pay nothing for internet service for at least a year.
More and more, people are realizing that broadband is something which needs to be universal, and that’s a function of democratic information. All people should have the right to access information. Fast (or at least relatively fast) internet connections are a way for this to happen. One additional condition I’d like to see added to broadband rollout is that all connections set up operate within principles of net neutrality. While that’s bound to happen here in the US given the FCC’s current position, I’m not sure if the rest of the world is quite there yet.
As for Freerunner, they’re the first group in the UK that’s really doing something to make the goal stated in the Digital Britain Report a reality. This is big because the first step is the hardest. More so than maintaining a network, the most difficult thing to do is to build infrastructure. Sure, it’ll be a bunch of WiFi hotspots when Freerunner is done, but first the company has to lead in cables to actually serve data to the communities. My hats off to you, Freerunner.
