Here’s An Opinion On:
Rural Broadband – Another Reason to Take to the Cloud
by
Nick J Davies
People from rural areas of the UK will soon be used to the idea of having faster broadband access in their home or at their office.
According to a recent article written by the BBC, the EU competition commissioner approved the state-funded scheme that will give the green light for rolling-out a major deployment of broadband access for rural areas.
One can then say that, in the UK, we re on good track for being the fastest country in Europe by 2015 when it comes to broadband speed.
However, some people may question this, since the technology that British Telecom (BT of course being the ones who won the bid) are planning to implement for rural broadband doesn t seem to be the most state-of-the-art technology that s available. Regardless, people in rural areas of the UK won t say no to having better broadband connectivity – and hey, an improvement on infrastructure connectivity definitely makes a difference.
But let me stop on one issue I ve noticed in the article mentioned above. Indeed, it is said that the only competitor to British Telecom – which is Fujitsu – just withdrew their bid to that market since it only covers 500,000 households while their minimum is the sum of one million households. Well, that s somewhat less of a great thing for people in the rural areas of the UK, since this only leaves one provider (BT) which, of course is not so good for end-users since they can t play on the competition in order to get the best services.
This aside, it s always a good opportunity for people in rural areas to get access to broadband internet infrastructure, especially in this ever expanding technological age. Rural broadband doesn t benefit just consumers however; this same high-bandwidth internet connection allows a lot of business applications to be used right from rural areas.
And this goes some way to explaining how this connectivity can impact on an areas economy.
Let s look at a case study; consider what people from Suffolk expect from the introduction of fast (>24mbps) internet connection. According to Suffolk s Council Leader Mr Mark Bee, the introduction of a broadband connection would create up to 5,000 new jobs for the region while helping the local economy grow by 20%: that s a huge increase. Most businesses would be tempted to question how such infrastructure could bring such a dramatic change.
Well, given that most business users would have already been acquainted with internet technology, the introduction of a faster, more widespread broadband connection would allow them to securely and easily take advantage of all those cloud-based applications that are spreading all over the internet and the world of SMBs.
Indeed, broadband access is works as a catalyst for the development of a lot of cloud-based applications: one of them consists of managing corporate (or personal) e-mail system on the cloud via a Hosted Exchange solution. But apart from this obvious use of broadband connection and cloud-based solutions, our rural business dwellers can now think of hosting almost all their crucial data on the cloud while being able to access them from anywhere and with any device. All of these changes come with new needs that need to be properly addressed and this is where new jobs and the good news for our economy comes in.
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Rural Broadband – Another Reason to Take to the Cloud