Broadband Growth

Richard Wray’s informative Guardian article- 14.6.07 , China overtaking US for fast internet access as Africa gets left behind, is a great piece of work outlining exactly where we have got to on the global broadband rollout.

And a pretty long way we have come in a short time but…..the biggest problems are still all about inclusion.

Richard points up in his piece:-

“There are more than 1.1 billion of the world’s estimated 6.6 billion people online and almost a third of them are now accessing the internet on high-speed lines. According to the internet consultancy Point Topic, 298 million people had broadband at the end of March and that is already estimated to have shot over 300 million. The statistics, however, paint a picture of a divided digital world. While there are high levels of broadband penetration in western Europe, North America and hi-tech economies such as South Korea, usage in developing countries, and especially in Africa, is pitiful. Many of these emerging economies lack telephone services, let alone the sort of broadband internet access that has become available to every household in Europe.”

Again Africa is being left behind – what massive problems will that cause for the world in the future? We left much of Africa behind in the economic progress of the 20th Century and we’re still doing it with the telecommunications progress in the 21st century. Can’t we learn anything?

This handy map – courtesy of the Guardian – shows where we have got to and the massive task that is still left to be done. It’s well worth studying closely.

map_broadband_1406.jpg

I have another major concern here. Richard says:-

“Almost 300 million people worldwide are now accessing the internet using fast broadband connections, fuelling the growth of social networking services such as MySpace and generating thousands of hours of video through websites such as YouTube.”

Yip…. (those who know me are already running for cover )… here we have a world that is spending it’s time on the pointless pap that is the bulk of the content of YouTube. Okay..okay… so it’s not all pointless -and now and again some of it can be funny – but is this the best that we can do with a massively powerful resource like the internet? If filling the world’s bandwidth with videos of spotty teenagers posturing to popsongs of anorexic pop stars is the best that we can come up with in a world that needs health and wealth creation education delivered to a great number of the population – then we are doomed as a civilisation!

Perhaps it is time to organise the talented youth we have in developed countries with an electronic version of Voluntary Service Overseas? Our young people with their massively creative potential may be labouring under a heavy burden of stock examinations but, when they escape to their bedrooms and dive into their computer alternative spaces, can we not find a way to employ their potential, creativity and energy to educate the world? At the moment we leave a huge empty space which is then filled with the total inanity of much of the Myspace content or taken over by the morally corrupt peddling pornography.

It’s the 21st Century…. we can do better with the expanding internet than this. Can’t we?