Advance warning: my view might be slightly biased, as the MD of a telecom company, but take it as an insider insight on the debate.
New businesses, and established ones that want to expand their products/services, must plan carefully for the location they choose to manufacture/trade from.
A distillery will want to be close to a fresh, peaty water stream with good, constant flow.
A haulage company will need to find a place for their warehouse with excellent road and rail links.
An ice cream shop might want to be in town, in a nice sunny road with good pedestrian traffic.
Likewise, a business that relies on good internet connectivity to trade successfully should find a suitable location where good broadband
is already
available.
It's entirely unreasonable to demand that telecom operators or the government provides universal super-high-speed internet access throughout the country.
While I accept that many businesses feel they must
be online to affirm their presence, very few
truly
req
uire high speed internet access (and by that I mean in the hundreds of megabit per second) to run their business.
I understand that some areas receive second (or third) grade broadband service, but the reality is that current technology is still limited by distance, and some rural areas are so far from the exchange that nothing will ever be able to provide internet connectivity on the existing infrastructure.
Remember that the ADSL service is
piggybacking on technology from the beginning of the 20th century,
120 years old. While 15Km of copper wires are still OK for a telephone service,
nothing
else will ever work with that.
To deliver universal high speed access throughout the country, we need to deploy a completely new network, be it fibre optics or 4G wireless, and this is a
major undertaking that requires a humongous amount of money and time.
We will get there, step by step, but in the meantime all businesses and individuals that
right now require high speed internet access to live, trade and thrive
MUST open or relocate where the service is currently available.
By end of September 2012 about 85% of the City of Perth will have the new FTTC service (Fibre To The Cabinet) to deploy 40 or 80 Mbps broadband, finally breaking the monopoly Virgin Media had until now thanks to its own fibre optic network.
You will be able to buy FTTC services (incidentally also from
my business) and enjoy good speeds even if you are far away from the exchange.
But you will have to wait for a good year or two to get FTTC to rural exchanges. Not because it's uneconomical, but because of the sheer technical difficulty of the work required to lay down kilometers of fibre optics.
Think collectively, and evaluate how much costs you in taxes to get the Government to subsidize fibre optics to your little hamlet, and then how much would cost you to relocate your business where high speed internet is available, as cheap as £25 per month - including line rental (
unashamed plug).
Your small shed at the end of the garden of your cottage in the countryside is not the ideal place where to run a business from, regardless of the breathtaking scenery or the apparent financial advantage. It's a false economy.
