I couldn’t help passing this one on, though I don’t mean to mock either Milton Keynes, a charming artificial town in England, or Online Journalism, a very worthy project of the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review.
Online Journalism today picks up a piece from the BBC about how British Telecom is trying to extend broadband connections across the country. (I’ve written about this before after visiting a village in Northamptonshire, which got around the problem of BT’s glacial broadband program by building their own Wifi network.)
Anyway, to cut a long story short, the BBC article talked about extending ADSL reach from its present range from a broadband-enabled exchange from 6 km to 10. Testing site: Milton Keynes, a town that could not be more in the middle of England since that was why it was built there a few decades back. It’s a garden city, and its sprawling layout and majestic avenues make it the butt of jokes, and more importantly, broadband a hotbutton issue. not But remote it’s not: An hour from London, an hour from Birmingham, an hour from more or less everywhere.
Unfortunately Online Journalism got the wrong end of the stick and wrote about “Remote towns in U.K. to get broadband service: Soon, remote areas in the U.K. will have broadband Internet access, reports the BBC News. BT, the leading ISP in the U.K., is currently running a test in the remote town of Milton Keynes in hopes of establishing broadband service for the area. The town was chosen because 18% of residents experience great frustration over Internet access, a higher percentage than in most U.K. towns due to the city’s remote location.”
I don’t know whether Milton Keynesians are going to be happy about this. The Shetlands are remote. The Scilly Isles, maybe. Milton Keynes? No.
There only one thing that annoys me more than being one of those many Milton Keynes residents that are screaming about not being able to get any kind of broadband…. and thats people who don’t know where Milton Keynes is geographically!! I can forgive to a point though, as MK is not really included in any regional area, be it south east, east or west midlands, east anglia or the home counties. In my view it is located in the South East Midlands but nobody seems to have recognised this area of yet!
I can further understand the writers confusion, however, because one would think that only remote villages in the sticks are left without broadband……no – MK is a city with supposedly more internet users and IT companies present than most UK places, yet probably the worst broadband availability of any comparable area of 250,000 population. If you are interested in further reading of Milton Keynes fight for broadband then visit http://www.bb4mk.org
The reason a lot of MK residents are frustrated about the provision of broadband and have in fact started their own action group is that (and this was the case in my house) the telephone network was too new i.e. fibre optic and in order to connect me they had to come down here and put in some older copper technology.