Our Director Kate Clifford blogs on
the vagaries of rural broadband and the potential that could be unlocked in
rural areas if it was improved….
Tuesday
night in rural Northern Ireland. A household comprising of two adults, two teenagers,
both at exam stage, and a younger child. It was a normal evening. Homeworks and
study being tackled by the older kids, dinner being made. ‘Get off the
internet’ shouts the six year old who is trying to watch Netflix. I can see the
TV frozen and buffering. The 15 year old shouts ‘get off the internet, I need
to download my maths paper’. I’m checking work emails and the phone is
buffering, and the final straw comes when number one daughter screams ‘Get off
the internet!! I’m trying to download my exam timetable’.
In our rural
household, a download speed of between 1.7Mbps and 0.07 Mbps depending on the
time of night, means that two devices cannot run simultaneously. BT Infinity
hasn’t reached us yet. We live beyond Infinity. Most evenings the Netflix
account will buffer and buffer until we do a search to locate a rogue mobile or
tablet device that might be stealing our band width.
Last summer our
internet speed was so woefully bad we were reduced to sitting in our driveway borrowing
broadband from next door’s much improved connection!
We are not
too far from our nearest town and we can afford to find alternative ways to
boost the speed of our connection. But with increasing reliance on the internet
for homework, work, communication and everyday life I wonder about households
with worse access than ours and children who fall behind in school because they
cannot afford a permanent connection nor mobile data.
I wonder
about rural businesses who depend on internet connections for payments, orders,
advertising and communication with their customer base and wonder just how
disadvantaged they are when compared with businesses in urban centres. How much
more do they pay for reliable and consistent broadband connection just because
of their geographical setting?
The roll out
of faster and faster speeds in urban centres is in danger of deepening a significant
digital divide across this region. As urban populations become better connected
and better served with faster and faster download speeds, rural areas are being
left behind and playing a constant game of ‘catch up’ as technology improves
and speeds increase.
The
economic, social and environmental benefits of the proposed government £150m
investment in ultrafast fibre broadband could be worth as much £1.2 billion to
rural areas of the province. That’s the estimate contained
in a report commissioned by BT and published in 2018, setting out the potential
benefits resulting from an investment focused in rural areas.[1]
By improving access to the
internet, economic growth in rural areas could reduce the gap with more
affluent urban areas. Regional inequalities permeate NI, and public policies
that address it have risen in importance in recent years. Expanding broadband
access offers a potential way to reduce these inequalities, enable the growth
of small business and could revitalize many of our villages and towns.
In the meantime, households
like ours have to prioritize who gets to use the bandwidth and when. Sometimes
we share and we compromise, prioritizing homework and work obligations over TV
viewing but more often we revert to type we squabble, we fight and shout ‘get
off the internet!’
