Britain's 7-point Strategy for Closing Their Digitial Divide

I ran across an interesting article on what the British government is doing to close the digital divide in their country. They have a seven-point strategy that is as follows:

• Ensure information and communication technology plays a central role in education, with all pupils given a ‘virtual learning space' to store their work and improved access to computers at home.
• A 'Digital Challenge' for local authorities and their private sector partners to provide universal local access to services by 2008, using IT.
• A new national internet safety centre to tackle online crime, involving the police and charities and relying on industry support to build on government funding.
• Promote the creation of innovative broadband content, including guidance on broadband content procurement by the public sector.
• Cross-government strategy for how the public sector can use modern technology to deliver services.
• A greater role for Ofcom in monitoring the take-up of broadband, particularly among disadvantaged groups.
• New policies to close the digital divide, with support for adult learners, improvements to home computing initiatives and ensuring all government Web sites meet accessibility needs.

Of these seven, the first bullet is the part of the plan that I believe will be the most effective. It’s hard to think in terms of abandoning the current members of the population who were not taught in schools with internet access, but I think the adult learning initiative in bullet seven helps to make up for that.

In a press release by the British government this surprising statistic can be found:

“By the end of this summer, 99 per cent of the population will have access to broadband and the rate of broadband adoption exceeds the rates of adoption seen for mains electricity, colour TV and mobile phones.”

The Brits have decided to skip ahead to outfitting the majority of the country with broadband rather than wait for the demand to progress from dial-up access. Being that England is a relatively small country with a great deal of resources at their disposal this is a good plan for them. I would think that the expense for the US government to do something like this would be massive and take years to undertake. The budget for the British plan is $150 million pounds, which doesn’t seem excessive to me.

Some further digging found this little nugget in an article from Computing Magazine online, “In order to meet its targets on broadband access the government has reclassified broadband speeds from 256Mbps to 128Mbps.” While it’s great that the British government is spending time and resources to close the digital divide in their country, they can’t change the definition of “broadband access” to suit their goals. Lowering the standards to meet a timeline seems like a mistake to me. I’m not an IT guy, so I don’t know what it would take to move back up to 256 later on, but with a 128 connection you run the risk of losing interest due to a poorer quality product. It’s true that this is better than nothing and better than most people around the world have, but it seems to deflate the sails of the project a bit.