Digital Divide Can Only Get Worse, Says Ovum

An Ovum analyst is taking the government to task over the lack of cohesive thought behind solving the urban-rural digital divide.

“The UK favours a market-driven approach rather than a radical national programme to roll out high-speed broadband on an equivalent basis,” said Ovum senior analyst Charlie Davies. “This increases the pressure for governments, regulators, operators, local authorities and other stakeholders to work together to come up with badly-needed, new and fresh solutions.”

Even Urban Areas Are Divided

Ofcom is already monitoring advertised fixed-line broadband speed claims and has criticised operators. It is also on course to test mobile broadband speeds for the next three months.

What Ofcom will hear from its test team at research firm Epitiro will likely start another row about the void between promises and reality, in the mobile world, alongside the fixed broadband speeds row. In a preliminary test last year Epitiro researchers claimed that the average speed was under a megabit per second, only 24 percent of the maximum promised.

Mobile broadband is supposedly the way of the future, but mobile operators face a severe capacity crunch (see graph), leaving rural users facing a double problem.

In both mobile and fixed broadband, it is rural areas which miss out, with poor cellular signals and, usually, poor fixed-line broadband, because of the distances from the telephone exchanges.

“Market-driven investment in both higher-speed, first generation and second generation, broadband networks follows a pattern,” Davies said. “The initial big push is in urban areas where there is more concentrated demand and the business case is more attractive. The next push is to less dense areas, for example, the suburbs or smaller towns. Finally, normally after a long wait, higher speed broadband arrives in rural areas.”

Davies pointed out that the irony of the situation is that the remote rural community probably would benefit more from faster services. While the provision is run on purely a commercial basis, with no incentive, the gap will persist.

“It is inevitable that this digital divide will widen as more households in urban areas sign up to 50 Megabits per second, and above, leaving citizens in small villages far behind,” Davies said.