UK 25th in Global broadband sweepstake, says Said

No sooner has the furore over Digital Britain whimpered away, but a new bang up to date one starts, as the BBC reports:

A study of the global state of broadband has put the UK 25th out of 66 countries in terms of the quality of its networks.

The UK was listed among countries whose broadband is "meeting needs for today".

The study was conducted jointly by Oxford University's Säid Business School and the University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics. It found that the average global download speed globally was 4.75Mbps (megabits per second), while average upload speed was 1.3Mbps. The UK's systems are "sufficient for the needs of today":

Researchers worked out how fit countries were to cope with the demands of today's users based on a set of applications consumers are likely to use.

These included sharing photos, using video on Skype, watching YouTube and standard definition BBC iPlayer content.

It found that two-thirds of the 66 countries met the criteria for today's requirements.

But only nine countries, including Korea, Japan, Sweden, Latvia were ready for future demands, such as watching high definition video.

This is a big improvement on last year's study which found only Japan was ready for the future.

This will of course have the same old crowd frothing at the mouth about the shame of it all, but as we saw during the Digital Britain thingy, answers came there none about how it would all be paid for. Furthermore, none of the suggested applications that potentially use this bandwidth actually make money, in fact most lose it hand over fist right now. And given Britain is technically bankrupt (we opted to fund bankers's bonusses rather than broadband rollout), there ain't no money anyway. (The Government has not, so far anyway, enacted our suggested Banker Bonus Tax to pay for the Digital Rollout ).

Also, its a snapshot in time:

"We forecast the UK will improve because of things such as cable networks being upgraded and the Digital Britain report focusing on next generation access," she said.

(The reality is that dense urban areas are getting faster connections anyway by default, via Virgin and BT, and thatw ill move the UK up the pile)

In fact, in an arena where technology change is so rapid, putting large amounts of expensive infrastructure (and given the propensity to argue for Universal Service Obligations and not being allowed to loop cable over poles, it will be very expensive) down right now will probably be a mistake.

Its probably worth putting this to bed for another 2 years or so, unless some earth shatteringly urgent application comes out of the blue.