Don't get me started...

I heard on Radio 4 this morning that Gordon Brown's Government is planning to give away free laptops to low-income families.

I was fascinated.

According to the report I've just checked out: "More than 270,000 free laptops with broadband will be given away to low income familes under a new Government scheme."

How lucky for them. My wife and I both work full-time yet only last week I was contemplating cancelling my broadband because we were trying to trim costs and there seemed little point having something that our six-year-old computer struggled to cope with.

The only reason for keeping it was that my wife and our two boys need it to access information from work, school and college. Apparently her work, and their school and college all rely on people having an internet connection at home. So what happens if you don't?

Does she get fired for not having access to emails? Are they kicked out of school for not being able to download their course notes? Probably not, but I don't see either the schools or places of employment offering to pay to keep them connected.

Thankfully, of course, we could now give up our jobs and get a free laptop and broadband, but we'd have no jobs with which to maintain connectivity.

I'm all in favour of helping low-income families, but shouldn't the help be offered in a more prosaic manner, rather than in the form of what really should be considered a luxury item?

Next thing we'll be hearing that as they struggle to get to job interviews they'll all be supplied with a 4x4.

The Labour party should remember the premise behind its formation. Admittedly there are a lot of low-income families at work, or wanting to work, but there are also a lot of people who simply can't be arsed. Why should they get the chance to watch an unbuffered BBC iplayer when I don't...?

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…