Social and Economic Technology - 4.4. Promotional Descriptions
High speed Broadband, or any other 'latest' Technology is not required.
The computer hardware manufacturers have made advancements, but sales have not been driven by user demand for those advancements. Hardware manufacturers too often rely upon the fact that only the latest software is supported by the industry, and that it is written to only function at all on the latest hardware. This situation has created progress, but the hardware passed the point that it could revolutionize a rural economy years ago. Making effective use of excellent technology that is 'past its prime' as far as big business industry is concerned, would be an excellent cost effective way of attaining a high penetration of Information Technology into the rural economy.
Communications are obviously the cornerstone of a software infrastructure, but high bandwidth and effective communications are not at all necessarily the same thing. At this point in time a rural software infrastructure would do better to concentrate on making really effective use of the telephone system already in place than consider very high bandwidth essential.
Concentrating on high bandwidths is counter productive.
There are many examples of trying to promote the rural economy by pushing a technology that is either unsuitable, or only suitable for a small part of it. If the technology is inappropriate, it can increase divides rather than narrow them. A classic example of this is forever creating higher Broadband speeds. The latest quite normally can only be implemented in suburban/urban parts of rural areas, to the exclusion of the 'rural countryside'. Cutting edge technology is not necessary to revive a rural economy. Well written software, sensibly applied could more than 'level the playing field' between the rural and urban economies.
Apart from video on demand, Broadband is mainly used to compensate for atrocious programming concepts, and to enhance the 'presentation' of big business imagery. This has very little to do with the real problems being addressed here.
High speed Broadband will come throughout the rural countryside eventually. It will be either by High altitude platforms, satellite, a big investment in terrestrial communications, or (least likely) a system of peer to peer radio communications. The latest technology is quite normally first rolled out where population is dense, and is often 'old hat' before it reaches the rural countryside, creating an urban/rural divide adverse to Secotek principles. Therefore it is essential that Secotek is built around what is available in rural areas, and not the 'latest' available. Fortunately this is technically feasible.