Connectivity ... and speed

The acceptance of instant connectivity whenever, wherever is becoming an issue in how we deal with people. Conversations in which friends apologise for not being able to respond quickly enough or of 'being out of reach' are becoming more and more frequent in my life and I notice that yesterday BBC News Technology ran an article on the 'great divide' (my words). A different group of 'haves' and 'have-nots' that all reading this will know about.

I am not the first, but would certainly like to be the last person, who points out that any education methodology that begins to rely on an infrastructure that is not equable can't be fair.

So what to do ? If you live in rural Scotland then conventional broadband will not come your way. But where there is a will there is a way:

The residents of Arnisdale, a remote village on the west coast of Scotland, cannot get broadband at all by conventional means. The village is nine miles from the nearest BT exchange at Glenelg - too far for a broadband connection to work.
But, in a project backed by the University of the Highlands and Islands and by the University of Edinburgh, Arnisdale is getting a wireless broadband connection from a series of masts which beam a signal from the Isle of Skye.
The project has been led by Professor Peter Buneman, an academic from Edinburgh University who lives in Arnisdale. He campaigned without success to get BT to take broadband to the village, and then decided that the community would have to find its own solution.
"I'm now getting better than 10Mbps," he said, "faster than you would get in a city."

So not a one-size-fits-all solution then.I also noticed innovation in Dundee where broadband is arriving by sewer!