After the comments from Ofcom about take-up in rural areas, the data we published on thinkbroadband.com shows that the digital divide is still out there but is more on the availability and ability to get a decent speed broadband service.
The day got off to a wonderful start with the phone going at 7:15am with a request for an interview on BBC Radio Berkshire at 7:30am. Usually like to have my morning coffee before engaging brain, but managed anyway.
Reading the comments both on the BBC site and our own are interesting, the demographic of readers to the BBC site is very different to our own broadband centric site and broadband providers along with those controlling the networks would do well to read a range of the comments.
What would be nice to do is visit a number of homes and see whether connection speeds can be improved dramatically with just a few adjustments. Only this week I pointed someone towards the solution of removing the ring wire from the master socket and they saw connection speeds jump from 4Meg to 8Meg. It is worth noting that the imbalance due to the ring wire has a bigger effect on ADSL2+ services.
One wonders how much work it would be for the providers to run some checks on their database logs and perhaps send a help sheet to those who seem to have slow connection speeds. The cynics amongst us will of course say this is not in the providers interests because the peak usage spike may be bigger if people are connecting faster - but then this is balanced by making customers happy, and a happy customer is probably more likely to stay rather than be tempted away by the myriad of broadband offers we see everyday.