Broadband crucial - not just for businesses
A news item today points out that our awareness of broadband Internet and what it can do for us has grown enormously since 2005.
Although the item below mentions New Zealand businesses, broadband Internet is crucial across all of our society. Community organisations, schools, clubs and individuals are all discovering how useful and important instant-on, high speed access to the Internet is.
Gearing businesses up for a digital future will be the focus of an impending revision to the Government’s Digital Strategy.
The Digital Strategy — originally launched in 2005 — is being revamped in light of rapid technology changes.
Acting manager digital development at the Ministry of Economic Development Janet Mazenier said attitudes to broadband had changed considerably in the the 2 1/2 years since the original digital strategy was launched.
Mazenier — who is in charge of the digital strategy revamp — said back then people weren’t sure what broadband was or why they needed it.
Now there is a call for highspeed fibre networks and connections to the rest of the world, she said.
A slow, occasional connection to the Internet (dial-up), is fine when all you want to do is access mainly plain text information with a few small images. It’s fine if the Internet provides mainly static content of limited utility. And that could have been the case 10 years ago.
But these days the Internet is providing so much more, both in utility and in connectedness. So much of the content is very rich: think Google maps, Wikipedia, podcasts — audio and video — TV programmes streaming or on demand, music. Think too of ‘connection’ applications: Chat (text, audio or video), social networking tools such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.
These days the Internet is becoming another utility, just like water, power, phone and drainage. 50 years ago a home may have had a couple of power points in the whole house; now there will be a couple on each wall of each room.
Dial-up Internet just isn’t sufficient any more, and not just for businesses.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
You might like to read these posts too:
0 comments
Start the discussion by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment