Tweet
Britain is falling badly behind the rest of the world in the use of broadband technology and the consequences could prove disastrous for education, health care, entertainment and the fight against global warming, one of the country's leading computer experts has warned.
Professor Christopher Bishop, chief scientist at Microsoft Research Cambridge, who will present the Royal Institution Christmas lectures this week, said the government now needed to launch an urgent programme to install fibre-optic cables across the nation and boost the country's broadband capacity.
"If we are looking for a government project that would stimulate the economy in the short term and help combat the impact of the credit crunch, while also bringing long-lasting improvements to the nation's infrastructure, then we could do no better than rewire the nation with fibre optics," he said.
Bishop, who is also a professor of computing science at Edinburgh University, said the failure to begin a national programme to replace telephone copper wires with fibre-optic cables several years ago was now having a serious impact. "We can now shift huge amounts of data speedily around the country but cannot move it for the last mile into people's houses because there is not enough bandwidth in our domestic telephone cables, the only effective route we have for taking broadband signals into homes and small businesses. This is beginning to have serious consequences."
In other countries, particularly in the Far East, fibre-optic cables - which can carry vastly increased amounts of data compared with copper phone cables - have been fitted to homes, schools, local hospitals, doctors' surgeries and small businesses. These are now giving teachers, doctors, householders and businessmen access to vast amounts of online data. Doctors can study patients' x-ray images and detailed health records; schools can download lessons illustrated with complex diagrams and video images, while video-conferencing may soon start to replace business trips, said Bishop. "This last advantage is particularly important because less travelling will mean less carbon dioxide will be emitted into the atmosphere."
Bishop said it was also vital that Britain ensured a supply of good computer scientists from its schools and universities in the next few years. "There are some really exciting advances in the pipeline - including the development of machines that can see and identify shapes with the sophistication of humans. That will bring about all sorts of changes, from development of PCs that can recognise faces reproduced on digital photographs to machines that will be capable of highly complex design work."
It was the need to stimulate interest in computing that led Bishop to approach the Royal Institution to present this year's lectures. "This is the first time in the 183-year history of lectures that 'thinking machines' have been the series's key topic," he said.
The Royal Institution Christmas lectures were launched in 1825 by physicist Michael Faraday. Apart from a gap during the second world war, they have been held every year since. The lectures were first televised in 1966. A key feature of each set of lectures has been the inclusion of demonstrations and audience participation, a considerable problem if you are talking about computers.
Bishop and his team have gone to considerable pains to get round this problem and this year's lectures include demonstrations of the making of jellyfish ice-cream with liquid nitrogen, the swinging of 14kg metal spheres to within millimetres of Bishop's head and a personal appearance - via a video link - by Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.
• This season's Royal Institution Christmas lectures will be screened on Five at 7.15pm from Monday 29 Dec until Friday 2 Jan. For further information, go to rigb.org/christmaslectures08
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
More...
