Will the UK ever agree on the internet?

By Shannon O'Connor

This week Telecoms.com has 16 year-old Shannon O’Connor joining the team for work experience, and today’s ‘thrilling’ task is to join Jamie at the Connected Britain event in London. Here are her thoughts. 

With the Connected Britain event bringing together executives from TalkTalk, CityFibre and Openreach, as well as government representatives, the question still remains as to whether they will be able to work collaboratively to progress?

As the speakers continue to roll out their plans for an accelerated investment in high capacity networking across the UK, there still seems to be a lot of busywork.

“If you could rollout out connectivity through reports and investigations, Britain would have faster broadband than Japan and Korea,” said Matthew Howett of Assembly, the chair at this year’s event.

But is there any action?

Minister for Digital and the Creative Industries, Margot James highlighted the inequality of connectivity not being reached within the rural areas of the UK. As major towns and cities continue to prosper and develop, those living in the outskirts face difficulties in sustaining accessible, basic broadband. Something which interested attendees intently as plans begin to emerge for infrastructure collaboration.

However, in the following panel it was clear that collaboration would not only create conflicting ideas between competitors but also allow those to question whether proper competition could ever come while working hand in hand.

Emerging from what the speakers said at the conference was quite simply uncertainty. There had been too much discussion and not enough action in developing fibre broadband within the public sector and beyond in the UK. There doesn’t seem to be any consistency or coherence; it seems asking adults to be mature and agree on a logical path is too much (and that’s coming from a teenager – Ed.).

As our Europe counterpart continues to prosper both economically and industrially, the UK continues to fall further behind because of an inability to agree.