Scotland: a world class digital nation?

We analyze the Scottish broadband case, in collaboration with Nicole Conner. The United Kingdom has been involved in the internet since its origins till Broadband Society, with the idea of wide area networking linking back to work done in computer science laboratories around the country, which in turn helped influence work carried out in both the US and other European nations. 

We can credit the World Wide Web to a British man, Tim Berners-Lee, who came up with the idea of hypertext, to allow researchers to share and update information. This was the first steps in the internet we know now, where we can use browsers and setup web servers. The internet has come a long way since this first creation. 

An advanced broadband scenario: the case of France

In this post we analyse the French broadband, with the collaboration of Marianne Fromencourt. Have you ever counted how many times a day you consult Internet? - The answer would be an average of 26,6 times a day for French people, according to an investigation realised by the society Ipsos MORI in june of 2016. It is almost the double number for French people between 18 and 24 years old, who consult their smartphone until 50 times a day. Internet appeared in France only 24 years ago, in 1994, but it represents today a big part of our daily life. 

 

Only twenty years after Internet's birth, in 2014, 80,7% of French households had an Internet access. Internet spirit follows us all day, from the news that we consult in the morning to the funny video that we watch to relax after our working day. Moreover we all have a full planning and some people do teleworking, so we want and we need a fast access to Internet. That's why broadband is made for. In France, broadband can be counted between 512 Kbps and 30 Mbps. The French Senate considers that we can talk about broadband from 2 Mbps.

Broadband with Irish flavor

The effort of the Irish to optimize their broadband is high, as we analyze in collaboration with Aedín Dunne. Ireland currently has one of the fastest broadband speeds in the world with rural Ireland’s broadband and connection still improving by the day. 

This was not always the case however as the first ever connection known as DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) went live in 2001, just 17 years ago after internet was beginning to be used in Ireland in the 1990’s.