Text of the invite:-
"This issue is clearly vital to the prosperity of the City and of all our citizens. New technologies and capacities have the power to radically impact on how our public services are organised and delivered and on private sector competitiveness. Whilst our city has benefited in the past from quality infrastructure, we need now to be thinking collectively about our futures. The session will cover how current government policy to encourage superfast broadband etc may impact on the city and the county. It will review current broadband provision within the city, note the pipeline investment anticipated, take the temperature from the business community on this issue and start to discuss how the city might benefit from advances in new technologies. It is hoped that a specific outcome will be some ideas for how we need to organise ourselves across both across the public, private and voluntary sectors."
My initial thoughts, based partly on my experience with running web development agency Ultimateweb, are as follows:-
- In terms of standard broadband the city centre isn't too bad - agree?
- Some outlying suburbs struggle to get good broadband speeds.
- Rural areas often have very poor coverage which could affect the ability for city-based firms to sell services that rely on fast connections.
- Is poor broadband putting off inward investment (cf. residential broadband being a consideration for home buyers)?
- Will wire/cable delivered broadband will become obsolete in the near future? Would it be better to concentrate on getting the next generation of wireless/4G/SuperWiFi connectivity?
- Is city-wide free WiFi like Swindon attempted anything more than a gimmick?
- Is the city too reliant on a small number of incoming backbone pipes? Are we resilient or are we too reliant on pipes to London, etc?
- What are the likely digital services that businesses and their customers will use in the future and what sorts of capacities will they require?
- Why did Leicester miss out on the Everything Everywhere 4G rollout when smaller cities such as Derby & Hull are getting it? Are we lobbying effectively for early access to new Internet connectivity services?
Nice work Rav. Just to expand on one of those points. I'm working with a guy who knew the owner of that Swindon company. Apparently it failed because, and I quote:
ReplyDelete"No-one checked whether they were actually allowed to put equipment on lamp-posts'.
Hundreds of thousands invested in a project where no-one had actually tested the fundamental premise.
Brilliant.
Out here in the bad-lands (Oakham) we're not achieving anything exceptional speed-wise, but having two pipes from different suppliers for continuity seems to work fine.
Very interesting point about the 4G roll out. I'd presume they did it based on customer density, but taking a positive step to bring such things into the city would definitely be a good thing as we start to see things like the Yota model for broadband become a reality in the UK. (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/10/features/hello-4g).
Chris
This may be too technical for me. Active networking is clearly essential for the future of the city - especially one with such diversity as Leicester - and we have great opportunities. However,it must lead to realisations of mutual interest and generate "interest and action nodes" - for example across education and business (adult English skills are in great need of improvement in Leicester). My own interests at the moment is in building a network using the vast amount of stimulating and informative material available from, for example
ReplyDeleteTED: http://www.ted.com
EDGE: http://www.edge.org/
RSA: http://www.thersa.org/events/video
Big Think: http://bigthink.com
to seed such nodes - there will be other simuli- evolving a city intelligence and self-awareness. An important part of this would be generating meetings, actual physical meetings, where interests could be set in context and made robust - perhaps leading to more mutual interests found.
I guess that I'd better stop here.