Bristol is ready for Carter’s Digital Britain…

by Stephen Hilton on June 15, 2009 · View Comments

Cartersdigitalbritain

On the eve of Lord Carter’s final Digital Britain Report our latest city data shows that Bristol’s residents are ready and waiting… 3 in every 4 are already regular Internet users who have used the Web in the last week.

Residents are most likely to access the Web at Home (76% in the last 6 months), Work (48%) and in School/College/University (17%).  Approaching one in six (13%) have accessed the Internet for FREE in one of Bristol’s Libraries.

A more detailed look at the data shows that men are significantly more likely to use the Internet at home than women (81% compared to 76%) although there is no significant difference in the number of men and women who say that they do not use the Internet.

Older residents are the most likely to say that they do not use the Internet, with 56% of those over the age of 65 saying this compared to only 2% of 18-34 year olds.

Those who do not work full time, disabled people and those who live in social housing are also all significantly more likely to say that they do not use the Internet.

15% of Bristol residents do not use the Internet at all.

Source = Bristol Place Survey 2008/9 (IPSOS MORI/Bristol City Council)

You can follow the Digital Britain announcement live here

[Thanks for the header image under Creative Commons ]

view photostream Uploaded on June 16, 2009
by bisgovuk
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Tagged as: Bristol, City Council, Connecting Bristol, Digital Britain, digital inclusion, Technology

  • impavadis
    Why charge landline users £6 per year for something they do not wish to have. Many pensioners are landline users, so as well as having there State pension reduced in April, thanks to this Government, they are now being taxed for another £6. Pretty good Fairness for all Gordon, could be a vote winner.
    Patrick Mason
  • BB, Stephen & MadTom:

    There's a wee Linux utility called pdftohtml that I've used to convert the Digital Britain report and it's trimmed a bloated 6.7 MB PDF into 3 HTML files (frameset and 2 sets of content) that weigh in at a mere 256 KB. However, there's some bad news if you like eye candy: all the images have been stripped out. Please contact me if you'd like a copy.

    -W
  • Stephen Hilton
    Bristol Blogger wrote "They have published PDFs of over 1m scanned documents, which are therefore not searchable"

    The Guardian's experiment in crowd-sourcing http://mps-expenses.guardian.c... is interesting here. It is the first example I know of, where a mainstream news paper has used the Web to effectively facilitate such shared action.

    Stephen
  • The point about PDFs also applies to the recent publication of MPs expenses.

    They have published PDFs of over 1m scanned documents, which are therefore not searchable. This is technologically backward.

    If the government can't get simple things like this right, what chance do they have of getting the big things right?
  • Stephen Hilton
    Hi MadTom, having just arrived back from Lord Carter's presentation in Birmingham with 2 hard copies of the Digital Britain report in my bag, I can only say that the PDF version is a lot lighter to carry :-)

    Seriously though, you make a good point. Apart from the bandwidth issue, I find large PDF's like this very hard to read and navigate on line. The Digital Britain team offer some “social media” outputs here http://pressitt.com/smnr/build... This includes videos etc but I can't see a HTML version of the report.

    Your point about MESH networks highlights how complex this issue is. If, in a Digital Britain, we anticipate more people will make a living through their digital skills, the question of who gets paid for what is not going to go away soon
    Stephen
  • MadTom
    Its worrying that a report on the Digital Britain is produced in paper format. Its no wonder we need more bandwidth when people produce 3Meg PDFs when less that 100k of HTML would have done the trick.
    It doesn't matter how many Gigs bandwidth you get - idiots will fill it soon enough.
    As for ISP's cutting filesharing - mesh wireless networking will take care of that - it wont be done on their networks!
  • Stephen Hilton
    You can download Lord Carter's Digital Britain report here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared... or just pick out the keywords here http://www.wordle.net/gallery/...
  • Stephen Hilton
    From the live coverage in Parliament -

    4.48pm: ISPs will have to cut filesharing by 70%: The government will empower Ofcom to demand that ISPs collect data about alleged infringers of online rights – by downloading or uploading content without permission – and to notify them that their conduct is unlawful. Persistent infringers could see their details passed on to rights holders – principally music and film companies, but also games and software companies – which could sue them in court.
  • Stephen Hilton
    DaveP,

    Not sure about an Internet tax? If I understand correctly, Digital Britain is saying one third could be left behind so Govt has concluded to raise a 50p levy on all fixed telephone lines to ensure universal broadband coverage.

    Ben Bradshaw also says that there will be Legislation to curb unlawful peer-to-peer file sharing.
  • DaveP
    There is no need for government to get involved in broadband - the phone companies are doing just fine. All this is simply to get its sticky fingers in taxing the internet. It is a small tax at the moment, but watch how it goes up every year at every budget.
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