Downloads aren’t on the up

A new report* shows that Britain is 31st in the world when it comes to the quality of our high-speed broadband connections.

Yes, that’s right … 31st, behind such technical luminaries as Lithuania, Romania and Latvia.

The study splits the results of its tests into five categories:

• ready for tomorrow - with super-fast connections and low latency;
• comfortably enjoying today's applications;
• meeting needs of today's applications;
• below today's applications threshold; and
• leapfrog opportunity – which is a strange one because that’s what we all used to call that moment on the school sports day when the girls’ sprint captain bent over to do some stretching exercises

The quality of the high-speed connections available here in the UK is apparently only ‘meeting the needs of today’s applications’ the report says. And I’m not even sure that’s true.

I struggle to use the BBC iplayer as I do not have ‘the necessary bandwidth’ and attempts to join the digital tv age by signing up to Virgin have been balked because we do not have the prerequisite fibre-optic cables outside our house.

And I find that particularly bizarre as the house is only about 15 years old. Houses further up the street, which are twice as old, do have access to such cables.

Maybe our end of the street just considered itself ‘too posh’ to allow working-class people in vests to dig up the road outside the houses.

I would say that’ll teach them to be so bloody short-sighted, but it hasn’t, because everybody else other than us seems to have Sky.

So subsequently, in a microcosm of Britain’s digital age, we’re probably the 31st best-connected house on our street … out of 30.

* The report was carried out by Oxford University's Said Business School and the University of Oviedo's Department of Applied Economics, and sponsored by the networking company Cisco. You can see why I didn’t mention it earlier…