Last year there were fears that a ‘digital divide’ would emerge between town and country, with residents living at remote rural addresses not being able to enjoy the same abundance of broadband internet services as their urban counterparts.
However new figures from Ofcom suggest that such a divide seems unlikely now or in the future – 59% of rural households now have broadband, compared with 57% of urban areas, according to the new survey on the consumption of media (digital TV, radio, internets, telecoms, etc) by UK households.
Perhaps blowing the party line trumpet somewhat, Peter Phillips, Ofcom’s strategy and market developments partner, championed the LLU program in helping to narrow the divide; “If you look back two or three years, rural areas were well behind where urban areas were in terms of broadband take-up and that was driven by a number of factors: the number of broadband enabled exchanges was much higher in urban areas, the number of exchanges which allowed competition … was much higher in urban areas than in rural ones.”
The report also said that online commerce helped to drive up rural connections and that shopping online was more popular in rural areas where there are no shopping centres or high street names.
“In total, about three-quarters of rural internet users say they use the internet for transactions as well as for information whereas for the UK as a whole it’s lower than that, it’s about 69%,” said Phillips.
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Richard said on 22 May 2008 at 6:07 pm #
All well and good, but what about speeds? The rural digital divide is widening.
Tom said on 27 May 2008 at 2:03 pm #
Check out today’s post!