Introduction

In January 2009 the Government released a report into the future of ‘Digital Britain’. This document laid the foundations for an extremely broad conversation between all stakeholders in the UK’s future strategy for telecommunications and media. Thorny subjects like the future of Channel 4 were discussed alongside a new concept of Universal Connectivity – that is, Broadband for all. Much of the focus of the subsequent media coverage has focussed on Stephen Carter’s goal to ensure that everyone in the UK has access, if they wish, to up to 2Mbps of Broadband connectivity.

Not everyone, however, has access to fast download speeds. There are still some areas in Britain where the images on a web page reveal themselves as slowly as the naked girl beneath the packets of peanuts down your local pub. The big question is: how is the government and ISPs going to improve the service, especially in these such Notspots – and who will pay?

With almost eight per cent of GDP spent online – that figure is expected to rise to ten per cent by 2012 – making sure that everyone in the country has access to a decent digital connection is imperative. Samknows is at the forefront of the campaign to ensure that this is achieved.

SamKnows has been tracking Broadband Availability since 2003 and we’re incredibly excited about the potential of this debate. The next report is due out in ‘late spring’ and this next document is set to outline the framework for a National strategy for Digital Britain. The initial focus is on the Infrastructure – how we actually connect to the Internet, this will then be followed by a much broader conversation around how we can then exploit this infrastructure. It's exciting stuff!

In mid 2008 SamKnows identified a real issue with the quality of information available in that much of it was anecdotal/inaccurate. This formed the catalyst for our Performance Benchmark Project with Ofcom in which we set out to create a single Methodology for comparing the performance of ISPs. For the first time all stakeholders will be able to refer to accurate information about how the ISPs perform both on an individual basis and comparatively. Ofcom intend to release the next report in late May 2009. This area of the site will then be extended to include live information from the Performance Network showing data on a per ISP basis normalised against our Availability Data.