Bandwidth, Money, and Other Countries: We are so spoiled

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7907529.stm Article: "Lord Carter Defends Digital Plan"

"'The truth is that not a single media company knows what its model will be in ten year's time,' he said."

This article provides a very interesting, though not as in-depth as I'd like, look at the state of Internet availability in the UK, as well as the state of record digitization in the UK.

I actually had to look again at the article's publish date because I was very surprised by a few statements, such as, "Lord Carter also used the meeting to criticise what he described as a "superficial misunderstanding" of how the UK would roll out next-generation networks (offering speeds of up to 100Mbps)"

I have traveled the UK, mostly staying in London, though also venturing to Dublin for a bit, and though I'm not surprised that so many people are left out of the loop access-wise--things are so dang expensive there--I am quite surprised that so few are up to even 100 Mbps, and that there are still a number of "notspots," to quote the article.

Friends in South Africa tell me that they are charged by megabytes per month. The folks I know from there are computer programmers, so they run out of bandwidth by about the middle of the third week of the month.