> IBM’s Watson, the learning super-computer that functions through the cloud and is able to give evidence-based medical diagnoses, will fail in the UK because a lack of bandwidth
Not actually very useful? Few commercial applications? Massively over-hyped? No, the problem was, according to this article, "lack of bandwidth". Huh.
> It’s going to change everything, from investment banking to the legal industry. That sort of service, being able to get remote diagnostics, can only occur if you’ve got bandwidth.
This sounds like something where you'd really be missing out. Maybe some Korean readers can chime in about the amazing remote diagnostics they have there now thanks to the universal free symmetric Internet access and IBM Watson?
> The UK will be frozen out of cloud computing because we don’t have bandwidth
The biggest cloud providers are US companies, but they have UK data centres as you'd expect. Most people I know use some cloud services (especially cloud data storage) and "we don't have bandwidth" doesn't tend to show up as a problem beyond, as in this article, people who just won't pay to go any faster...
... and that's the important twist in this.
Providers will charge you more for the better service, and some people expected that to be free even though providing it costs more. The vast majority of the UK (more than 97% of UK households) could get >30Mbps Internet. But that would cost money, and many of them would rather not. This wasn't done by Margaret Thatcher (unless you have it in your head that a famous Capitalist suddenly wanted to give away a valuable service free) it's our friend the Free Market.
You can buy 1Gbps symmetric in my street (and most of the city). Few people do, most of the people I know who've bought that service did so because the 40Mbps or 80Mbps vDSL they were used to isn't available at a new property they bought. Obviously Internet is a must-have, so the 1Gbps symmetric fixes that, but if the offer had been 100Mbps symmetric they'd have cheerfully paid the same price, which gets to my main thrust in all these discussions:
Always On is what matters. The most important quality of life change for me was getting Always On, not getting broadband Internet. For most people who experienced the upgrade they were simultaneous but I lived with Always On at 56kbps for many years so I know what mattered. From about 1996 I lived in a house with shared 56kbps Always On. Obviously we didn't video conference at that bandwidth, but most of daily life was the same as now. Got a question? Web search. After not very long that means Google. Downloads take a little longer, you watch TV still instead of Youtube or Netflix, but mostly it's the same. I would check my work in after a day or evening writing C, to a CVS server because even Subversion didn't exist yet.
In about 2000 we got DSL at 512kbps and that was nicer, but the basic shape of life did not change. Whereas in households where DSL was their first taste of Always On it made a huge difference and too many of them mistook that for a difference caused by bandwidth which it isn't.