IoD Scotland lobby for world class connectivity
In its policy manifesto launched this week the Institute of Directors Scotland urged all political parties to invest in world class connectivity to help drive economic growth.
The IoD argues 'Scotland need a globally competitive digital communications infrastructure, ensuring high speed broadband, mobile and wireless coverage is available to all our communities. While the UK Government has set a target for universal access to 2Mb/s by 2015, countries such as Finland and Sweden are committed to speeds of 100Mb/s. Scotland needs to ensure we are not left behind.
Our competitors are already investing in significantly greater capacity, with Holland deploying fibre to the home (FTTH), and the Japanese investing in 1Gb to the home. SCDI in its ‘Blueprint for Growth’1, Reform Scotland2 and the RSE’s Digital Scotland3 have all made the case for accelerating investment in this vital infrastructure. In their recent paper ‘The Journey Back’, The Federation of Small Business also highlighted the need for greater wireless and mobile coverage.
The IoD recommends:
• The implementation of the Digital Scotland Report proposals, ensuring Scotland has universally available, internationally competitive connectivity with a minimum standard of 16mb by 2015.
• The re-establishment of a Scottish Internet Exchange.
• The installation of a direct telecoms connection to mainland Europe, providing resilience to Scotland’s national communications network which currently is over reliant on London for connectivity to Europe and the rest of the world. A direct connection to the Amsterdam Internet Exchange, for example, would also promote and engender business growth through low latency connections which are essential to improve market efficiency for many businesses.
• Further investment in telecommunications engineering R&D to ‘expand’ the capabilities of existing broadband infrastructure. The development of ‘lean’ mobile applications has demonstrated new ways of delivering services, using thin edge access technologies. We should explore how these might translate to the traditionally bandwidth hungry fields of broadcast media and games.
The full IoD Scotland manifesto can be found here : www.iodscotland.com/images/IoD%20Scot%20manifesto%20LR.pdf
