I was recently involved in a study of broadband services in rural areas involving both a mapping study and a survey of businesses. The whole process threw up a fascinating insight into the problem of developing a useful and targeted broadband policy.
The received wisdom in this area was that a number of small towns were poorly served by broadband and the survey of local businesses largely supported this view. However it was strongly contradicted by the mapping exercise – this suggested quite the opposite. In an attempt to reconcile the difference, it was much easier to check the cold, hard data than to suggest to businesses that they might be mistaken, so we looked at the logic of the data – a town in question was a tight, nuclear market town and had its own telephone exchange at its centre which supported the data in pointing to a good broadband service. A line check on each of the business lines further supported the data, and finally a software speed checker corroborated the data. There remained little scope to support the business communities belief that they were poorly served by broadband.
So what was going on? A theory supported up by a conversation I had with a professional pollster ran along these lines:
Defined market towns tend to build up their own support structures which can lead to the community becoming reliant on a narrow and possibly isolated pool of expert advice; the more esoteric and scarce the skill, the greater the scope for that advice to be of less than the highest quality. Here a respected opinion can become the received wisdom and if this wisdom is proffered by a local IT company that isn’t, shall we say, as technically adept as perhaps it might be, then a local mythology can easily develop.
This mythology can then be readily communicated using the more effective mechanisms of a tight, well structured community giving a wider voice to the views of the town.
Contrast this with more sparsely populated areas where people tend to travel further to plug into support networks and different people may seek support in different directions. This is more likely to create a richer, more diverse advice network where myths are more readily challenged.
More sparsely populated communities are perhaps also more used to poorer infrastructure, and may have less effective communication channels. As a result, sparsely populated rural areas – relative to small towns – may under report their broadband problems.
I think the lesson from this is that while the narrative of communities is critical to developing a broadband policy in rural areas, it should be used to add colour and to personalise cold, empirical data. That the nature of the problem should be based on facts, while the narrative gives voice to the impact of that problem.
As the shape of the digital divide hardens, with urban areas set for “superfast” broadband while rural area stay pretty much as they are, the debate is increasingly becoming emotive – and rightly so. During this time its critical that the interventions, however, can be targeted on those of greatest need and not necessarily those with the greatest voice.
In part two I’ll start to look at how the data can be used to support a local narrative – to keep the problem defined technically, but giving a stronger voice to the people and business suffering from poor infrastructure.
