I stumbled on this interesting read on how government policy impacts broadband adoption (and services around it). There is a direct correlation between broadband speeds and services, including the impact on GDP. A lot has to do with the availability of services. The official definition of broadband in the UK is 24MbPs. Something similar was in vogue in India where the official definition was not revised upwards of 256kbps for many years. While somethings have improved (across the Atlantic), local fibre is important to achieve teledensity (and telemedicine), to achieve the goals.
Dr Cochrane explained: “Fibre To The Home gives you an infinity of bandwidth, both ways, that you can upgrade forever, and it’s symmetric. If you go for Fibre To The Cabinet, you finish up with an asymmetric service. Now, this is really important. Why? How about the cloud, the cloud is not an asymmetric service, video conferencing is not an asymmetric service, so the whole ethos of the telecoms industry has been skewed by decision makers who think that the future of the internet is watching TV or movies, which it isn’t”.
These are genuine concerns:
“The UK will be frozen out of cloud computing because we don’t have bandwidth, worst of all we don’t have symmetric bandwidth. And the UK network cannot support the population in the cloud. It will be OK if you’re in a hotspot for bandwidth, and there are some hotspots of bandwidth in the UK, but for the most part the population will be frozen out.
RadOncNotes 