Broadband News
News, views and analysis
CLA go hunting for Notspots
16 Jan 2009 | 09.24 Europe/London
The CLA have drawn attention to rural broadband notspots in a press release in which Dr Charles Trotman is quoted as saying that the organisation "still receives inquiries from members frustrated they cannot take advantage of these services because they live in remote rural areas". There are of course plenty of non-rural notspots and individual lines with problems in addition to the highlighted remote locations. A notspot is a location that can't get broadband via phone line or cable, the opposite of a hotspot.
BT claim 99% coverage of ADSL but even this still leaves 1% or about 300,000 phone lines not able to provide a broadband connection. There are of course alternatives like satellite with universal availability or 3G mobile broadband with more limited coverage but free of the constraints of a phone line.
We see surveys and campaigns about Notspots on a regular basis, including a well documented study by the Community Broadband Network in 2006, but very little action results. Either nobody cares, or those that do care don't have any money to do anything about it. Too often the argument seems to focus on the precise scale of the problem when in reality it doesn't matter if it is 100,000 or 1,000,000 because what the notspots need is an engineering solution and an economic package to deliver that solution. They don't need a continuing debate about whose fault it is or "why aren't BT doing something about it" but something more like the Welsh and Scottish initiatives to locate and validate notspots and publicly fund solutions from robust suppliers.
BT claim 99% coverage of ADSL but even this still leaves 1% or about 300,000 phone lines not able to provide a broadband connection. There are of course alternatives like satellite with universal availability or 3G mobile broadband with more limited coverage but free of the constraints of a phone line.
We see surveys and campaigns about Notspots on a regular basis, including a well documented study by the Community Broadband Network in 2006, but very little action results. Either nobody cares, or those that do care don't have any money to do anything about it. Too often the argument seems to focus on the precise scale of the problem when in reality it doesn't matter if it is 100,000 or 1,000,000 because what the notspots need is an engineering solution and an economic package to deliver that solution. They don't need a continuing debate about whose fault it is or "why aren't BT doing something about it" but something more like the Welsh and Scottish initiatives to locate and validate notspots and publicly fund solutions from robust suppliers.