You wake up, eat your breakfast and read the news online – seems to be quite normal for all of us living in bigger cities. But it is a luxury or even an unattainable pleasure for those living in notspots.
Notspots or slowspots are areas where online access is quite limited if it actually exists in general.
It has recently been reported that a hotel has lost a contract worth £70,000 because its visitors had trouble connecting to the World Wide Web and… decided not to come back. How’s that for living in a notspot?
Well that business is not the only one struck by the plague of no Internet access. An indie broadband research firm, SamKnows, said that in fact millions of Brits currently lived in notspots – they couldn’t even tweet how their day was like or update their Facebook status, as the download speeds were nowhere near 2Mbps.
But notspotters are planning to combine their powers and go out of the dark much earlier than the government-set agendas, it seems.
Take Flintshire, for instance.
Matt Wright, the Flintshire council’s executive member for economic development, said:
“We aim to be the first county in Wales to be fully broadband enabled, five years before the Welsh assembly target of 2016.”
While the lack of broadband brings communities together to take action, let’s hope that being well connected won’t break them apart just like big city hotspotters, each stuck to the screen of his Blackberry, laptop or iPad.