Slow Internet Is Preventing a Million Brits From Having a 'Normal' Online Life

A UN study may have classed the UK as one of the best-connected nations in the world, but according to researchers, the digital divide is set to widen in the coming years, and it's not just down to discrepancies in age, income, or education, but the difference in access to high-speed internet.

In a study titled "Two-Speed Britain: Rural Internet Use," researchers from Oxford University's Internet Institute and the University of Aberdeen's Digital Economy Research Hub investigated how people living in rural areas were likely to face increasing internet connectivity issues due to sluggish broadband speeds in the future.

"The existence of this divide—a two-speed Britain—means that over one million people in Britain are potentially excluded from, or at best find it challenging to participate in, what is generally regarded as 'normal' online social, commercial, creative and civic life, because they live in deep rural areas of Britain," write the researchers in their study.

"The idea was to look in more detail than previously at the impact of low-speed internet connection in remote areas," John Farrington, lead study author and Emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen, told me over the phone.

The researchers demonstrated this divide by sampling people from remote, "deep rural" communities and "shallow rural and urban" locations. While a 2013 report by UK communications regulator Ofcom predicted the digital divide would narrow as more rural areas in Britain got access to faster connections, their findings actually suggested that it might just get worse.

They found that while five percent of urban internet users had an average broadband speed below 6.3 Mbits/sec (which is considered quite slow), in remote areas 53 percent of people were unable to achieve this speed. The digital divide is worst in the upland areas of England, Scotland and Wales and in lowland rural Britain, with 1.3 people affected in "deep" rural Britain, and 9.2 million people affected in "shallow" rural areas with poor internet connectivity.

Slow speeds or lack of internet access, said Farrington, would have serious socio-economic repercussions in the future for these rural communities. More young people from rural communities, for example, would choose to migrate into cities. Farming costs would increase as farmers continue to use analogue paper databases or livestock registration methods that require payment as opposed to free internet-based methods.

In February 2015, EE, a British mobile network and internet provider pledged a £1.5 billion investment in improving 4G network in rural areas, and in their study the researchers also reference government initiatives such as Broadband UK (BDUK). However, they state that "current commitments to roll out superfast broadband exclude as much as 10 percent of the UK population, in the region of 6.5 million people." This, they say, has encouraged rural community members to try bottom-up approaches that involve laying down their own fibre optic cables.

While Farrington said that government and private sector initiatives represented a step in the right direction, he added that more collaboration between the government, private sector, and communities could increase understanding on the exact state of internet connectivity in more remote locations.