In the past 24 hours we have actually moved down the National League Tables one place to #38. To sign up to the BT Race to Infinity Campaign and put us back up to #37 and lower, please ask click on the link below – or ask your neighbours and friends to do so if you have already signed up:
http://www.racetoinfinity.bt.com/
I had a commute-from-hell to get home last night with a train being broken down at Orpington and my train taking the side-track via a suburban frozen waste.
Today I greatly benefitted from the efforts in the past ten years to provide broadband to our community. It allowed me to work from home and do email, Skype calls and productive work from my home office. When I had my own business in 1996 we had dial-up, the internet was very basic, and working from home was very slow email with very slow browsing. So slow, in fact, that I had to go back to London to get a “proper job”. Today’s internet experience is now very workable – even though my meagre 2-3Mbps kept on dropping in and out with the pressure of other home workers using the internet in the village. I was actually much more productive, spending the 4 hours that I might have spent (had the trains been running) doing real work. That said, when I mentioned to a friend of mine (who lives in Reigate and gets 50Mbps) that we had only just tog 2-4 Mbps he laughed out loud (LoL’ed).
As an example, (and as part of this campaign), I rang the local garage on Monday to persuade them to sign-up to this campaign for next generation broadband. They said they were fine with broadband as it is at the moment. It did everything they wanted: email and a bit of internet browsing. In some senses, what we have now is SO much better than what we had before (in the mid 1990s), that there is room for complacence and a degree of satisfaction for what we now have….
But in the new world – (the world we are now creating) – the jobs will have to be (globally) competitive and will require a completely NEW superfast broadband infrastructure for the UK. It will have many of the basic characteristics of what we have now, but will be safer, faster, more stable, more interactive, have a lot more video (where you can see the people you are talking to) and have a far greater global reach.
We have to invest in the Next Generation Broadband TODAY. That means putting fibre optic cables much closer and eventually up to the homes we live in and businesses we work in (often, as I proved today, the same thing). With climate change, the weather is likely to become more unpredictable (how many times in our memories have we had commuter-disrupting snow in November?). So we are going to have to rely on broadband to take the brunt of unpredictable weather.
It is time to invest. Please register your vote AND ask your neighbours and friends and businesses you know in the Goudhurst area to do the same. If you have already signed, please ask them to visit this site and sign up here:
http://www.racetoinfinity.bt.com/
Let’s get Goudhurst to become the most connected village in the Weald of Kent!!!