Earlier this week, I attended an excellent unconference event here in Cambridge called Amplified 09; the objective of the discussion is to encourage innovation, creativity and communication in the UK. One of the most interesting discussions was a review of the Digital Britain report published earlier by the UK government.

Connecting Britain

The Digital Britain report outlines the action plan to get the UK more connected, and one strand in particular caught my interest. It has been criticised for lacking detail and vague commitment to make a difference, guaranteeing a “digital universal service commitment” of 2Mbits/s across the UK – half the current average speed of existing connections. While it’s noble to focus on giving remote areas access, which I assume is what they intend to do, 2Mbits isn’t exciting.

In the same way some countries are bypassing the traditional fixed line connection and jumping straight to mobile phones, could the answer in better broadband be with mobile connections? While we’re behind in countries like Japan where 92% of handsets sold in 2006 (yes two thousand and six) were 3G phones, the move towards faster mobile access is happening here too.

Granted, there are still hurdles to a fully-connected country – namely a need for a stronger infrastructure especially in non-central regions and improved speeds – before it becomes a serious alternative. I do wonder, however, whether the solution will come in the form of a small dongle or integrated SIM slot within a laptop, which can be used regardless of location. The theoretical speeds for mobile connections with HSDPA and HSDPA+ do get pretty sexy.

Free As A… Dongle?

Digital nomads already make heavy use of mobile connectivity, as T-Mobile’s figures show – it has seen its sales of mobile dongles and USB modems rise by 35% between 2nd and 3rd quarters in 2008. While some regions of the UK aren’t yet covered and may take a few years to get usable speeds, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a single provider for connectivity, regardless of whether it’s used in a handset or laptop and regardless of location? I do wonder how long it’ll take to get to this stage.

Personally, my limited experience of mobile broadband has been lukewarm to date but the idea and the opportunities excite me immensely. The freedom of sitting in the middle of a park with my speedy phone or laptop appeals much more than sitting in a cold office, doesn’t it? Would you drop landline connectivity if the quality was good enough? I think I just might.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 7:15 am and is filed under Mobile devices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.