Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) still find
their ambitions severely hampered by their inability to access
high-speed, low contention broadband, writes Mark
Seemann.
According to the government's Small Business Service, SMEs make
up 97% of the British economy. For them, particularly those in
rural areas, broadband's accessibility is more akin to a luxury
rather than the necessity it has now become.
The government said it would commit to provide a universal
broadband service by 2012. Unfortunately for SMEs, the commitment
is only for speeds of up to 2Mbps.
Lacking ambition
The Federation of Small Businesses has already lambasted these
plans for lacking ambition, accusing government of being in a "time
warp".
The plan to increase broadband speeds do not go anywhere near
far enough. All it does is tinker with the speed rather than solve
the underlying issue, which is that the UK is building its
broadband network on archaic technology.
The nation's copper infrastructure desperately needs to be
upgraded to fibre optic in order to satisfy businesses'
requirements both now and in future.
With copper wires, speeds will not push much past 50Mbps even
with the latest broadband technology. But in reality the average
sustainable speed is far lower.
If the underlying infrastructure was changed to fibre optic, the
speeds today could be 100Mbps per customer rising to 1Gb. This
would permit the most advanced business applications, such as high
definition video conferencing and streaming complex software over
the internet. These can't be with low broadband speeds.
Digital Britain is not helping SMEs get faster connectivity
because many don't have the money for long distance, high-speed
connections. Those SMEs that do have access to 'business grade'
broadband still suffer from downtime when the service offered by
network providers slows or goes offline because of traffic
congestion at peak times.
If the government really is serious about ensuring businesses
have access to high-speed broadband, it should regulate the
service, imposing hefty penalties on network providers who have
frequent outages, and force them to compensate small businesses
whose livelihood has suffered due to their services being
offline.
There is much talk about 'the cloud' and what it can offer
businesses. I believe these headlines will fade as using 'rented'
IT services such as business email and customer management tools,
which include secure data storage, server management and 24/7 IT
support and maintenance, simply becomes the norm.
All we need now is for UK plc to get on with the job of
providing the broadband infrastructure that is vital for our
nation's competitiveness in an increasingly tough global market
place.
Mark Seemann is product strategy and development
director at
Outsourcery