CMUThought Community Thought 100 day Challenge

The UK digital divide refers to the number of people who don’t have any access to the Internet. In the United Kingdom at the moment that means approximately one in four people who have never used the world wide web. These figures refer to adults only, by the way.The Comcast Internet Essentials program aims to bridge that gap by providing low cost broadband access to families that occupy the lowest economic denominators of the web using demographic – in other words, people who would benefit from having access to the net, but who can’t afford to use it.The figures go like this: one third of the households in the UK don’t have the internet. That’s a figure that should be set to rise if the number of households broaching the poverty line continues to increase as a result of yet more financial turmoil in UK, European and global markets.

39% of the people who don’t have access in the UK are aged 65 years or older. There’s a worrying corollary to that statistic – of all the people in the UK who could see a significant increase in their quality of life through access to the web, the older generation are among the most likely candidates. Home delivery and access to medical support and information on a 24 hour basis are just a few clicks away – if you have access to the Internet that is.

The Comcast Internet Essentials program has already debuted in the US, to some acclaim. Over there, the criteria for eligibility is linked to inclusion in the National School Lunch Program – if a family has at least one child receiving free school meals, then that family is entitled for inclusion in the Comcast Internet Essentials initiative.

So here’s the thing. There is as yet precious little (i.e. none readily available) information on the net about how the Comcast program will work in the UK – how people will be eligible for reduced cost broadband access. In America there’s a facility for also providing cheaper computing equipment to facilitate web use, if you qualify for the Program in the first place. Again, as yet the web is free of information on how the Program is going to translate into the United Kingdom – so it seems sensible to take the US model as a likely indicator of how things will work over here.In which case, while the Comcast Internet Essentials Program is going to be great for children and their families – and so it should be – it will be less obviously of use to the 39% of the electronically disenfranchised who are older than 65. That said at least the children will be getting a good deal – and of course if the Internet is all about creating opportunities and spreading knowledge, then the young people are where the fruitful soil is.

Perhaps once the Comcast program starts to infiltrate the UK broadband market, we will see online opportunities spreading out across the board – from the young to the old. It will certainly be a chance to start revering some statistics: including the fact that 70% of people living in social housing are not online. Maybe it is time to make information freer again.