Bad broadband is a trueWelsh scandal
IF THE electricity in more than half of the homes in a Welsh constituency regularly cut out there would be a national outcry that people were paying for a basic utility that failed to meet minimum standards.
Broadband access is essential for people who work and study at home, for businesses of all sizes and for public services. But in some parts of Wales half of connections are slower than the UK government’s proposed minimum of 10 megabits per second (Mb/s).
Poor internet access drives people in all walks of life to distraction. Farmers now need to submit “paperwork” online, many government services are delivered digitally, and it should not be too much to hope that licence fee-payers in any area of Wales can watch BBC iPlayer.
The cost of internet access has become yet another household outgoing at a time when there is widespread concern about pay stagnation and Wales’ dire position in the rankings for low wages.
If people are paying for a standard of broadband access that is not being delivered they have a right to feel angry. This is something that should be tackled by government and the communications regulator Ofcom.
It is annoying to sit down in the evening and find it is impossible to watch a show on Netflix because the internet is playing up. But unreliable broadband should not be brushed aside as a trivial complaint.
Companies great and small need to use online technology to exploit commercial opportunities. It is unthinkable that a business could operate successfully without a reliable phone line and it is intolerable that so many companies are struggling to get by with spluttering broadband.
We can plough money into international marketing in efforts to win investment for Wales – a task that will only grow in importance as Brexit forces us to look for markets beyond Europe – but there is little chance of a high-tech outfit starting up somewhere with grindingly slow broadband or no mobile access.
Any investor will want assurances that he or she has no reason to worry that such basic forms of communication won’t run at world-class standards. Too many parts of Wales regularly go offline.
Today’s report from the British Infrastructure Group of MPs highlights that Carmarthen East and Dinefwr was the constituency in the UK with the slowest download speed last year. This is not a title anyone wants to win and we should do everything we can to ditch this wooden spoon.
When potential investors hear that rail electrification – a technology that is standard in swathes of the developed world – will not reach Swansea and they experience the regular gridlock on the M4 they may well wonder what has gone wrong in Wales. So do hundreds of thousands of people who long to see real progress.
We need to ensure that by the time our nation’s children enter the workforce they have the skills they need and the infrastructure they deserve. The Western Mail newspaper is published by Media Wales a subsidiary company of Trinity Mirror PLC, which is a member of IPSO, the Independent Press Standards Organisation. The entire contents of The Western Mail are the copyright of Media Wales Ltd. It is an offence to copy any of its contents in any way without the company’s permission. If you require a licence to copy parts of it in any way or form, write to the Head of Finance at Six Park Street. The recycled paper content of UK newspapers in 2014 was 78.5%