State of the (digital) nation revealed by Ofcom

When I was writing the connectivity section of my book and needing official statistics on the pace of UK broadband adoption, I used Ofcom’s site regularly. Drawing on Ofcom’s Communications Market interim report, today’s Silicon.com article paints a picture of an increasingly internet-savvy UK population embracing broadband (10 million connections!), mobile telephony (though not VOIP – see UK punters avoid VoIP in droves) and digital broadcasting (coincidentally, there are also 10 million Freeview set-top boxes and TVs in the UK).

While browsing the web on this topic, I also came across a BBC story, Viruses plague British businesses, explaining that computer viruses are the single biggest cause of security problems for UK businesses, according to a survey by the Department of Trade and Industry. Almost 50% of the biggest security breaches suffered by companies in the last two years were due to infection by malicious programs. In some cases viruses crippled key systems such as e-mail for more than a day while companies cleaned up (the worst outbreaks took up to 50 days to fix!). I think the virus problem would be another element I would add to my email argument advocating reduced reliance on email.

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