The Welsh technology sector has the potential to become a leading regional UK ecosystem but is being held back by several institutional hurdles, according to a new report.

The regional ecosystem is said to be suffering from a lack of “diverse investment routes”, which is acutely affecting startups in the sector.

The study, run by startup policy non-profit Coadec, said that startup founders in Wales report feeling increasingly isolated in the broader UK tech scene, while many feel the government lacks a concise long-term outlook for the future of the ecosystem.

“Startups wanted access to more diverse investment routes,” the report noted. “Most founders and ecosystem members we talked to highlighted the difficulty raising funding from angel investors and VCs in the Welsh startup ecosystem and identified this as the ecosystem’s most serious and pressing weakness.”

“Multiple founders who moved to Wales from London, either to attend an accelerator or for personal reasons, noted the investment scene in Wales was quite a ‘shocking’ contrast,” it added.

Wales does boast notable “early success stories”, Coadec found, specifically in the fintech and cyber security spaces. Fintech was identified as one of Wales’ “most prolific and well-known areas of startup growth”.

Statistics from FinTech Wales, the non-profit organisation that represents the sector, estimate that Welsh fintech startups generate more than £3.6 billion in value to the economy.

The Welsh cyber security sector is also growing rapidly, and is now home to more than 400 companies, including global firms such as Airbus, Thales, Oracle, and General Dynamics.

Long-term, the report said that these high-growth industries could provide strong foundations to support the regional ecosystem, but warned that funding gaps were still a critical issue limiting growth.

“This shows a tech ecosystem with serious potential,” the report said. “But that potential needs investment. Wales is seeing record levels of investment year after year, but it is still too low.”

In response to these challenges, Coadec outlined a series of recommendations to help bolster support and diversify funding routes for startups operating in the sector.

This included a concerted effort to “actively flag the network at home and abroad” and broadening entry requirements to Angels Invest Wales – the country’s largest angel investment syndicate run by the Development Bank of Wales.

Coadec also called for the establishment of a programme that backs the creation of more venture builders in the region, as well as a commitment from the government to support and expand regional co-investment funds.

Finally, it called for a review into how government funding can be “leveraged to provide better engagement with startups”.

Regional disparities

Startup support on a regional basis in Wales also poses serious challenges for the broader sector, Coadec found. Founders raised concerns that a concerted focus on “equitable” support could inhibit the high-growth potential of specific sectors and areas within the country.

“Founders felt that, in some cases, a laudable attempt to be equitable across Wales’ regions and sectors has meant that resources are diverted from the areas where Wales has genuine opportunities to become global leaders,” the report warned.

“As Wales’ urban centre, South Wales is home to its biggest cities and universities and the six most populated unitary authorities. It is here that we can see the tech sector’s most striking growth, with Cardiff home to 426 Welsh high-growth companies, a quarter of the total.”

Despite concerns over the future of the Welsh technology sector, there are positive signs looking ahead, Coadec noted. A 2021 study from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), for example, revealed that the country had a faster overall tech growth than the UK average.

Wales also had a higher proportion of high-growth companies compared to the UK average, suggesting that the sector was still capable of producing dynamic new companies.

This growth rate continued throughout 2022, Coadec added. A December 2022 study from R3 recorded a 143% increase in the number of startups founded in Wales compared to the same period in the year prior.

Rural communities face increased brain drain, poorer business opportunities, and worsening digital exclusion under current government broadband plans, an industry expert has argued.

Poor broadband outreach has undermined the potential of rural businesses, said Dave Happy, Managing Director Telint Ltd and Non-Executive Director Jet Engineering, with many job seekers now being forced to relocate to well-resourced urban centres instead.

Speaking on the IT Pro Podcast, Happy argued the effect of poor connectivity on rural communities is far worse than the stats may suggest.

“The loss to the rural economy of not having this fibre in place is infinitely greater and far more personal than people really understand.

“In terms of gross value added (GVA) I think the stats, if anything, are depressed. I think that the real loss to the rural economy is far more significant than we can report, because one has to remember these are simply economic indices of measurement.”

Happy warned that businesspeople who may wish to establish companies in rural areas are being deterred from doing so due to their poor connectivity. He gave the example of attempting to conduct a simple Teams voice call while driving through Dorset, and having been unable to due to poor connectivity.

The more prospective entrepreneurs and tech workers move to urban areas out of necessity, both in terms of better connectivity and job opportunities, the worse the overall landscape for rural business becomes.

Current network availability may also be hindering innovation throughout rural England. Leading edge technologies such as 5G mmWave also have a role to play in the agricultural tech sector, according to Happy, including using the standard’s high throughput for analysing individual ears of grain in a field. However, Happy argued that the current government thinking on 5G use cases is too siloed for rural businesses to benefit.

Happy suggested that “pockets of excellence” may be deployed, with research and development hubs designed to help build expertise in a given area spread throughout rural England. These could fill the same role as centres such as the University of Sheffield’s new 6G research facility. He’s currently working on a Skills Development and Training Centre for delivering fibre alongside water at Dorset Innovation Park.

These could help to retain local graduate talent, as well as attract workers from around the country to bolster rural business and improve connectivity in underserved areas.

The government’s target is for 99% of UK premises to have gigabit-capable broadband by 2030. However, in its latest update, Building Digital UK (BDUK) reported that only 36% of rural premises are gigabit-capable and just 33% have full-fibre broadband.

“I actually feel deep concern and support, and pity for BDUK, I think they're trying to do a cracking job. They really are trying to make a difference. And their approach to open access and stuff is really good.

“But on the one hand they're doing great work and on the other hand, it almost feels like Ofcom's given them a kicking, because what we're doing by changing what areas are not covered by what, and when, it doesn't seem to me that it's quite joined up.”

Britain’s fibre broadband boom is continuing apace, and alternative network providers (altnets) are leading the charge into rural spaces. Happy highlighted Wessex Internet as one such altnet direct-burying fibre, and noted that these smaller firms may be key in delivering more fibre for rural areas, and delivering on open network opportunities.

The planned 3G sunset, which will see 2G and 3G services shut down across the UK in order for network operators to prioritise 4G and 5G, could also affect rural businesses to a disproportionate extent. Many rural businesses use cellular services for reliable connectivity, and Happy pointed out that “it is not impossible these days that you might be served by some kind of radio solution, or might even be dependent on your 2G or 3G signal”.

He argued that as 3G fills a connectivity niche between 2G and 4G, it’s possible that retiring it could be done with minimal disruption, but that 2G is a more critical network without which rural businesses will suffer.

“2G does give you that excellent coverage,” said Happy.

“The difficulty in terms of spectral efficiency is well known, it's not the most efficient. However, I don't think that they can turn it off easily because the quality of the rest of the infrastructure in a rural area simply won't permit it. Now, I haven't seen that actually stated in a press release by anybody anywhere. But that's the real truth behind it.

“So you can't switch 2G off because it's such an elementary baseline and there's nothing else if you did, it would be a disaster.”

The government has begun trials with Starlink in Snowdonia to test the effectiveness of satellite broadband as a solution for underserved rural areas. However, this will not be able to provide gigabit internet and instead will offer top speeds of 200 Mbit/sec through direct contact with special user terminals.

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘The crisis in rural connectivity'. We apologise for any errors.

Rory Bathgate

Hi, I'm Rory Bathgate.

Jane McCallion

And I'm Jane McCallion.

Rory

And you're listening to the IT Pro Podcast, where today we're discussing rural connectivity.

Jane

The conversation around UK connectivity is often centred around the rollout of 5G, or the race for widespread gigabit broadband. But for many rural communities, basic connectivity such as reliable cellular service is still lacking, limiting the successful operation of rural businesses and continuing the already present divide between business in and out of the UK’s big cities.

Rory

In areas like Dorset, private groups have taken measures into their own hands to ensure they receive the connectivity they need in the region. Today, we're speaking to Dave Happy, collaboration lead at 5GRuralDorset, to discuss the connection difficulties facing rural businesses, and what is being done to help.

Dave Happy

Thank you very much indeed. Well I have to say this, of all the things I've done in my 37 years in telecoms, is the one closest to my heart. Thank you for having me.

Jane

Thank you very much for joining us. So first off, can you tell us a little bit more about 5g rural Dorset?

Dave

Yeah, I'll give you a short pen portrait. It was part of the original department of Digital Culture, Media and Sport's, 5G testbeds and trials programme. It was originally envisioned as a programme that was only going to be of around value 5 million I think. During the course of the two and a half years or thereabouts that it ran, with an extension, it doubled in value. The partners included all kinds of people from Dorset Council who led it, I have to say, excellently to a large bunch of smees from all over the United Kingdom. There was academic input from Strathclyde University up in Scotland, one of the largest industry participants came from Wales. Rural is a big problem. And to think that Dorset could be at the forefront of leading a programme like this to help rural was something I'm immensely proud of. And although that piece, the formal piece has now come to an end, I think that the legacy speaks for itself. And there's now a formal mapping programme, which we can also discuss, and how that fits in with the programme later on in the podcast.

Jane

Yeah, it's really interesting, you say about how big the rural community is in the UK. We're often as you said in the introduction, whenever we're talking about connectivity we're talking about London, classically and Manchester, Liverpool, and so on. But a very high percentage of the UK is not a metropolitan area, it's small towns, it's hamlets, it's villages. And there are there are people living in those areas who would like to connect to the internet, in fact.

Dave

Yeah, and I have to say that not only do I strongly agree with you, I think it's long overdue or well past the point where we need to be gripping this problem as a nation. You know, having worked as a vice president in Samsung for a while, one of the things that I picked up in career was the great word 'pali-pali': 'now, now'. I cannot understand after 37 years why we still even have a digital divide, let alone on a scale which with the withdrawal of 2G, 3G, and copper switch off is actually going to be exacerbated, not improved. Now, however you look at that it's unacceptable. I've been told in the past never to use the word digital apartheid, which is now precisely why I do so. Because to me, this is a form of discrimination against those that happen to have grown up in a rural area, or those who are elderly and happen to live in such a rural area for whatever reason. Or a farmer who happens to be clearly by nature of his or her profession, in the middle of a rural area. And why should they have any poorer quality of service, not be able to place an order for their items on Amazon, not be able to download Netflix. But more importantly, interface with their surgery, get help from the council, try to interact with a bank to find out what their credit should be on, for example, an electricity bill not that many of us are worried about this stuff. But we really are. This is the reality of life in a rural community, and it frankly is unacceptable. We need to be gripping this, and to the extent that 5G RuralDorset has been able to play a part in fixing that problem, which incidentally it was never designed to fix, it's absolutely brilliant that this stays on the agenda. And we need to make damn sure it stays there until it's fixed.

Jane

And not to mention all these case studies of how the IoT can be used in farming, which are all great. We have, we'll have to put it in the related links in the show notes, a case study involving connected cows. But you know, you hear more about sort of combines and other law large machines on farms that in theory could be connected. But if there's no signal, then you might as well not bother, because they're certainly not going to drive themselves.

Dave

I mean, this is one of the weird things okay? Clearly, if you're setting this up and you only live in Westminster, and you've never heard of a famous place in Dorset called un Iwerne Minster... Iwerne Minster is not Westminster. These are different worlds, the solutions and the remedies that one might apply as a regulator or as a policymaker that might fit well in Victoria Street or outside Westminster Abbey do not uniformly apply in areas that don't have even basic service. And one of the things that we need to do is to make sure, as I said earlier, that we're not disadvantaging whole swathes of our population, young and old, who just happen to have the misfortune to live somewhere that doesn't have good connectivity and therefore can't even benefit from all the new stuff that we've been dreaming up. And I'll give you one thought. One of the things that we were doing appeared to be an unrelated project. And if you think back into the history of how our industry worked one of the biggest successes on the mobile networks, as I'm sure you may not know because your're both far too young, was SMS, Short Message Service. Now, this was not something that network operators foresaw as a major growth. And yet it was, and it was because it met a specific need. Well, now we have another specific need. And let me outline to you one of those examples. On what appeared to be an unrelated programme, we were looking at how we might improve grain production. We were looking at this partly as a result of the situation in the Ukraine, which as some of you may know was the world's second largest grain producer, until recent events, obviously made that impossible. So how can we still use less but generate more? Well, I'd actually go as far as to say I think we're in the middle of a second agrarian revolution right now, through agri tech that people just haven't woken up to, because they're all too busy telling me about industry, 4.0. I'm really tired of this. Right, what we did was we started using very high frequency radio. And for those of you that know anything about physics, and again I'll keep this really simple so as not to bore you. If a signal can only travel a short distance, we typically call it a high frequency signal and to that high frequency signal you can attach a lot of megabits or gigabits, whatever you want to call it to. So the lesson that I want to give you is if you're going to go for higher-frequency spectrum, it might only travel a few hundred metres but you might be able to carry gigabits worth of data over it. Now think about this. Everybody thinks of these applications in terms of small cells in a city, right? Oh there's lots of people in Oxford Street, they're all using tonnes of stuff, because they all want to watch Netflix while simultaneously being on eight teams calls and talking to their grandma in Bolivia. I mean, the reality is fine that's all true. But don't forget, through AI and analytics and smart technology I also want to use that in a rural area. What we did was we said, "Okay, what if we could use millimetre wave and connect it to an unmanned tractor using electricity? What's the advantage there? Why would we do it?". First of all, we had a system where we could use that tractor and we could scan a field for every single plant, we could then go back to a database and decide is that plant a weed? Or is it not not a weed, right? If we say "no, it's not a weed", we leave it. If it is a weed, we have an electric probe that comes along after on another tractor, electric of course, and zaps that weed. And what that does is it also puts nutrients back into the soil - let's not discuss the USA and dust bowls in the 30s, if you think it doesn't happen, it does. We have to look after our soil, we have to look after how all of this stuff is done. And all of a sudden, I've come up with a use for millimetre wave radio that requires a brand new chipset with high uplink capabilities. And all of a sudden, we were very much in the technical space that you guys and I inhabit. And yet nobody saw it coming, just like with SMS nobody saw the thread. And yet if I can find a way that could get fibre to the farm, this is a new acronym FTTF, note it note it well we'll be using it a lot. And guess how we might do that? We either direct bury the fibre like pioneering companies like Wessex internet for example in Dorset already do. And/or maybe we look at technology like fibre in water, because guess what? Farms have a need for irrigation. So if I need to get fibre closer to a farm, and I want to do the things that Jane was referring to earlier, including IoT, if I can get that basic connectivity there, I can use doubling grain production to do that because I've now managed to do that and not had to use pesticides on the field. I haven't had to buy so many of those nasty chemicals that I need to actually enrich the soil, which I can't afford anyway because they've gone up by 650%. Happy days. Now tell me, as I erect that mast on the side of the farm building, or on another small tower. If I erect a mast strong enough for double loading, in other words I can put two sets of kit on it. And that means that I can see either another local farm, the local school, an old folks home, whatever it might be that is a way forward. And all of a sudden, instead of just doing a research programme that was looking at a theory of stuff and what might be, we've come up with something about what is. And and we've come up with a way that we could begin to address that. And we've looked at a whole new design for chipsets with massive uplink instead of downlink capability. That's game changing. Welcome to Dorset, Dorset does, just don't think we're all asleep down here because we're not.

Rory

So when you're talking about some of these exciting applications, I know you mentioned direct burial there, you mentioned Wessex internet. As it stands, is this a case of cannot or will not on the part of the network operators?

Dave

I think it's a case of economics, I would say cannot. If it is a case that we've structured a market, and we have a regulatory environment which clearly incensed them to build where they can get the best bang for their buck, then I would contend that it's a statutory duty on their board members to do that. And therefore, there's no magic panacea here. There's two ways to fix this problem in a real way, they're either the costs come down to deploy the network, or the revenues go up from the network, or some combination of both. Now, if you want to make the costs come down, and the operator cost base is too high, one of the options is to empower new private networks perhaps. And guess what? The fastest growth in the UK is in private networks. If you want to empower that you need to do innovative stuff with spectrum. I mentioned Ofcom earlier, and credit to Ofcom for coming up with the design of millimetre wave spectrum supply that will enable those rural areas to start utilising those tractors, and not having to pay money they don't have for a service they can't afford, provided by a third party that doesn't really understand the rural need in the same way because it doesn't have a footprint there. And if you think that SRN is going to fix it, that's the shared rural network, I would contend again. Dream on. That's another problem we can come to in a minute. So let me come back to your question and your hypothesis there. I don't blame the companies concerned, whether they're fixed or mobile, for not doing that that doesn't get them a return on capital. Where I struggle is not having found an effective way, and seeing over decades repeated announcements about how it's all going to be closed and everything's going to be fine. Well, yeah, but where I'm sitting right now it isn't. And not only that, the stats bear it out. So let's just have a small reality check, and let's think calmly and constructively between all of us how we can fix it. And I think one of the things that you want to do is push and pull a problem at the same time. If operators that exist don't want to do it, either let little guys that can do it more cheaply and or give them additional revenues. And if you can't do that, which you can't because we don't have the income in a rural communities, then there's a role for central government in helping that to happen. BT UK, for example, has been useful in doing this kind of stuff. They've done innovative stuff in Cornwall, and some stuff going on in Dorset I'm aware of at the moment. But we have to just do more. And we have to do better, because it's not acceptable to have a digital divide this century. I'm sorry, it just isn't.

Jane

Yeah, I was gonna ask actually about sort of what the role of the government is. Whether that's local or national government, for example there is a very small village, it's a hamlet really that I know in France. And when I first visited there was no connectivity, we didn't even have a television. Now they've got faster broadband, certainly faster broadband than you will find where my parents are in Wiltshire. And is there a possibility that that's what we need to do here? And if that is what we want to do, is it going to happen?

Dave

Okay, is it what we want to do? To a degree, yes. Is it going to happen? No. That would be my... I believe in straight answers to straight questions. However, I can give you a more positive steer at the end of it because I do see a third way. I remember France, I also used to live in France many years ago. And I remember Minitel. I also remember having lived in Germany, the development of early ISDN, ISDN2. There is a point where it's the right time to do something, and I think in the UK it's fair to say we've left it a bit late. We are no longer major manufacturers. Our problems have been in my view, partly a failure to release spectrum more quickly, although I understand why Ofcom is cautious. I therefore challenge the orthodoxy that underpins spectrum pricing as no longer being fit for purpose. That's one. For fibre I say like I said before, if we can find ways to either reduce the cost of deployment or look at ways that we can enhance the revenue, and to do that everyone's always gone for let's enhance the revenue and stackable use cases. Well, if they're making the kit of course they'd say that. If they're an operator, of course they'd say that it's very, very difficult to do that. If you're struggling with finances, and you're on an income of maybe 17 and a half, £18,000 a year you don't know what the future of the Common Agricultural Policy that's now defunct, who's going to pay for what to keep you in business and keep you alive. And the average age of a farmer is considerably older than the national average and other professions. So we should be doing more to help our farms, we should be doing more to help our rural communities. I think Defra, as one of the departments that isn't going to be merged into something new, I hope shortly, have an interest in this. And I know I've spoken to the NFU on a couple of occasions whom I write most highly. So I'd like to see the continued growth of for example, more true independent neutral network hosts. Now, typically if you talk to a mobile network a neutral network host is, oh, it's one of us four. Well no, it doesn't necessarily need to be that at all. And not only that, in the new world all I really want for connectivity is an Ethernet port. I'm not even sure I need switch connectivity in the way I used to need it. So guys, if you don't come along and provide it and make that investment, I'm gonna go to someone else that can. So what I'd like to see is that fibre rolled out, for example why shouldn't every village in Dorset or indeed every rural community have fibre to the local village hall? Why should we not have free Wi-Fi 6 hanging off the end of there? Is this beyond the wit of man or woman? No, it isn't. The handsets to do this, this kind of tech, how many frequencies have you got in a handset? Probably in excess of eleven these days, you can link to satellite, you can link to multiple Wi-Fi bands, you can link to multiple cellular bands, you can make sure you don't get lost on your way to work but hurry up in case they switch the satellites off. There's all kinds of stuff you can do. And to say that we can't do it or we shouldn't do it isn't good enough. What we have to do therefore I think as a country is to look more at the standards angle here. Because what we're suffering from is a downstream problem. If we're not making stuff, and we're not spotting where the the opportunities are, and therefore what's in the standards isn't in these devices that means people can't use them quickly and cheaply. Now, if I'm doing stuff like agricultural robotics on funky new chipsets on farms, using a frequency band that you can now get in a form factor, meaning the size of your phone okay? Then surely that's an intelligent way to proceed. And if we could continue to spot technologies, for example, you wouldn't back WiMAX would you, let's back Wi Fi. We need to be looking at the standards, we need to look at the spectrum and the third 's' that I will add to that is security. Because it doesn't matter whether you're in an urban or rural area, if it isn't insecure and you can't trust it, you're not going to use it. So I think an intelligent combination of that as a way forward, combined with making it easier for smaller companies to get radio spectrum and to deploy fibre, having that all most importantly of all intelligently mapped on a platform that enables alternative network companies to swap their capacity or just to swap their assets, is a really smart move. Oh, guess what? Fibre in rural Dorset, mapping it all, doing this is exactly what one of the outputs of the Dorset project is and I believe just signed up to by a company called Wildanet in Cornwall this very morning

Jane

I mean, the name of the organisation is 5G RuralDorset and I'd actually quite like to talk for a moment, we've been speaking about fibre. As I understand it, once again listener back to my days when I was living in the countryside. We had no mobile signal when I was living between Shaftesbury and and Salisbury.

Dave

Oh, difficult terrain.

Jane

As I understand it, part of the problem yeah is the geography. Listeners cannot see this, but Dave is making hill signs. You just cannot get the signal to work with the geography and actually mobile broadband, which has worked super well in places like Africa where it is much flatter, doesn't work here because millimetre wave can't even make its way through concrete sometimes. Let alone a big old chalk down. What do we do, is mobile broadband, mobile internet, do we just forget about this in a rural context?

Dave

Okay, no, I don't think we forget about it. And also for those of you listening to this in the future, I'd like you to think about something that you might find interesting to conjure up a mental image of the terrain we're talking about here. For those of you old enough to remember the Hovis adverts on the television. There's a wonderful street which people wander up. It's a really steep street, it's got buildings on either side, it appears to have been a real life cut out from the mid-19th century. That's Shaftsbury. For those of you in Yorkshire, I apologise but that's ours, we own it. Back off. Now, on that note however, we have a lot in common with our friends in North Yorkshire and the moors in terms of difficulty of the terrain and economics of this. My contention will be is that we need to have a more open minded approach to this. I don't see mobile necessarily as part of the solution, I see it perhaps as part of a problem. The spectrum holdings of the mobile networks are actually in the lower frequency bands. But the demands are coming increasingly for greater capacities to these devices, which in turn, these mobile devices are going to require ever higher frequencies. Now that's going to cause a real problem. That's why stuff like network densification is important, but I'm not interested in what we're doing in Oxford Street because I don't live in Oxford Street. I live on that street in Shaftesbury, and I can't get a signal across to Salisbury because the terrain is difficult. And I haven't got any base stations, we don't dream about or have problems with whether or not we have overbuilding in rural areas, we have a far simpler problem. It's called 'any build'. And in order to make this work, the only way to do something which actually meets two needs both coverage and capacity, I see the two as two sides of the same coin. It's just not acceptable to have just coverage and no capacity, because then all you're doing is you're rationing food between people that are all hungry, that's wrong, you shouldn't be thinking that way. What you should be thinking of is how do we get that big capacity utilised? If the laws of physics are telling us anything, they're telling us that what we need to do is get fibre deployed as far and as deep into these places as possible. And if that means I can do it at 30 or 40 quid a metre by simply direct burying it, or not subducting it but getting something in there, that's more sensible to me. Yes I know, in the States and other places you can string it between poles. I'm talking to you from a rural area right now where it is fibre to the pole, and it is hanging off, and it does break down in the wind. But it's still sure as hell a lot better than the alternative. So I don't see mobile as a solution, because I don't don't see the spectrium holding as relevant to the capacity needs that Shaftesbury and Salisbury still have. I don't see it as a way of serving the rural spots in between, because wherever there's a farm I want to break out from that fibre and enable my millimetre wave robots and all the IoT and other devices, as well as let the children on the farm do their homework and watch Netflix, and all the other things that normal people do in the real world. And I don't want discrimination to exist in any place. And therefore I say we have to get fibre in, we have to do a deeper and Jane, I think asset mapping is the key here. And that's the thing that could unlock it, and is well worth discussing further because I think it's something that everybody else misses.

Rory

I mean, we've talked to him about some of the solutions here. And I know this is something we touched on earlier. But I was wondering if you could expand for our listeners some of the biggest challenges for businesses associated with with poor connectivity in rural areas, and maybe what the impact on the local economy is as it stands,

Dave

Oh, it's major. If you're in a business and you can't even get a basic Teams call set up, it's just unbelievable. I'll give you an example, I was actually driving across Dorset less than 48 hours ago. I was trying to be on a Teams call at the same time, it dropped out on at least three occasions. This was in a 20 minute period for what should have been an hour call. In the end, I had to drop out completely. I have as yet no clue what the conclusion of that business deal was, or whether or not we were even able to transact any business. And therefore to the second part of your question Rory, what impact does this have? Well governments and others measure, local government as well, measure on gross value added GVA. What what is it that we're losing out on, in effect, in our areas as a result of not having that connectivity? Well, I can put a value on that business deal. I can also put a value on something far less pleasant, and I'll tell you this because it's a true story. One of my neighbours recently died, God rest her soul. And she would have been in her mid 80s. I'm in the middle of nowhere, I'm in the lee of the hill, the coverage is appalling and I've got trees around me. And we're it not for the fact that I've complained bitterly and ended up getting fibre to the pole, and I no longer have a problem within my house, this was not the case when fate overtook her. And what happened was the ambulance showed up, they were trying to communicate with the local hospital which is 25 minutes away. Forget your eight minutes ambulance targets because we've already died if you live in a rural area. Another good reason for improving rural connectivity, because there's an NHS set of cases around this. The reason that she died was at least in part because they were unable to communicate and get ECG information about her heart rhythms and quality to a consultant, who was available at the other end of a line had they been able to get a signal through. She died. Now, for me that's deeply distressing and personal. We talk about this in some kind of esoteric way, like nothing actually is real or it doesn't matter, or it's okay to have a divide. It's not okay to have apartheid, it's not okay to have people die, it's not okay for children not to be able to do their homework. It's not okay for a farmer not to be able to do his or her job properly. It's not satisfactory, this is not the Stone Age it's a techno age, we need to do far better. So in terms of GVA, I think the stats if anything are depressed. I think that the real loss to the rural economy is far more significant than we can report, because one has to remember these are simply economic indices of measurement. And we don't know exactly what line items they put into it, because I bet they didn't put my neighbour who died into it. I bet they didn't put what would the cost of a lifetime value of a life have been if that lady or gentleman had been in their 30s, and the tax income and all of those things. If you want to do that, that's the terrible, sordid, and unpleasant work that people do when they're looking at actuaries, and insurance benefits and payouts. But only part of that is, as I understand it, done for GVA. So the loss to the rural economy of not having this fibre in place is infinitely greater and far more personal than people really understand. We need to do better and when I say it, when I told you I meant it from the heart, now you know I do.

Jane

Yeah, and there's also presumably a brain drain issue as well. Younger people move away because the jobs are in the larger towns in the cities. You may not even be in the county they grew up in but yeah, so if I wanted to found a business in we're gonna give listeners we're gonna give you a tour of the rural South West. But if I wanted to found a business just outside Wilton, which is also near Salisbury, I can't help but think that there would be limited impetus for me to do that rather than move to Southampton. And do it there where I know that I can get the support from a tech point of view, from a business point of view. And when it comes to the digital divide and levelling up and all that, this is the reality of the problem with connectivity.

Dave

In terms of location, your point about Wilton, Wilton is also not Westminster. And if you're trying to operate a business and you know that you must have solid, reliable connectivity you know that you're not going to get it when you're moving about around from Wilton, because I know the terrain fairly well. Between Wilton and Shaftesbury, and that whole area, is equally hilly, the coverage is equally lousy. So if you start a meeting, find that you have to go out to do something else, you don't have the flexibility you would have done in an urban area just to do that because you can't, that ties you to your desk, that may mean you lose other things. These are real problems. So getting that fibre in, and I've mentioned Wessex internet I should stress other brands are available, the smaller altnets making these investments. If they begin to be able to link up their capabilities and capacity to extend their footprints and obiter dicta they're able to improve the radio coverage because more spectrum becomes available, and more open neutral network hosting becomes available where they can play a role in it too. That would be great. If the MNOs are able to do that quicker then that would be great. But just for God's sake, get something in that takes away this location dependency because, as you rightly point out Jane, the inevitable conclusion of this is it sucks people into more urban areas where there's already pollution, congestion, and all the problems that go with being in that environment. But we have a circular economy, the urban areas can't function without the food that the rural areas provide, the rural areas can't function without some degree of dialogue with the urban areas and would want it to be so. And then you might get a pandemic, where everyone in the urban area wants to come and rush out to a rural area. And then find they can't because there's no connectivity, I'm just saying. So point one location, it matters, your point is well made and it needs to get sorted because we will not be able to encourage people to look at this in a broader context and move to outside and actually have a living in a super area. And let's face it, who wouldn't want to live near Durdle Door and have the quality of life that goes with that if they could also have the salary that they would have got if they'd have stayed in Dulwich? Now, your second point was skills. I had for two and a bit years a young lady working for me who was a postgrad at Exeter University. She was a Dorset resident and absolutely brilliant, studying the geographies of 5G. During the programme, we went back to DCMS and said "could you change the rules on collaboration to make it more inclusive?" Again, discrimination is a big thing of mine. It really is important that we stop this nonsense and to encourage, in particular, people from rural communities. In particular, women from rural communities in an industry which is full of middle-aged middle-class people that look and sound depressingly like me I'm afraid. It's not good enough. And I hold my hands up, okay, mea culpa. So I did something about it, we acted as mentor for the young lady concerned who has now been recognised as one of the top 100 people to watch in the field. Recognised, she's got multiple awards, she's met the former minister I forget they changed so often these days, don't they? Also, she was interviewed on Connected Britain, she's just really all alert and about herself and able to give us information and insights about how we could improve skills that would help her to stay in her home county of Dorset. Because she's from the Bridport & Lyme Regis area. Exeter is her local university. If we could develop an ecosystem technical hub, which we're currently working on in the area of Winfrith, for those of you that know Dorset Innovation Park. One of the things we're looking at, we don't know yet if we can make it happen, is a Skills Development and Training Centre for fibre and water. We will be putting in a bid in the near future to someone from a government body or regulator that might be able to assist in that regard. So what we see is the chance to develop pockets of excellence, and try and build all that expertise in a given area. It might be fanciful, but one thing I do know is that if you don't try and if you don't take individual and personal responsibility for mentoring somebody younger than you in a rural area, and you then try to give them better prospects, then you failed. And that in actual fact, the thing that you don't measure by gross value added benefits realisation on the DCMS programme, is whether or not you've been able to change young lives in a positive way. One of that young lady's colleagues is now working for a company of which I'm on the board. That would not have happened, but for the 5G RuralDorset programme. And at the moment, we've been able to keep her working from home in Cornwall. Am I proud of that? You betcha.

Rory

Something I wanted to circle back to that you mentioned earlier, is this idea of the sunset for 3G and for 2G. I know we discussed this briefly at an event recently, but take 2G. Ofcom has set a target of 2033 for when all 2G services will be completely deactivated in the UK, if not before then. Between now and then, at the moment, does it feel like the necessary steps will be made so that rural communities don't feel its absence?

Dave

May I be cheeky and broaden the question to include 3G sir?

Rory

Absolutely.

Dave

Oh, thank you. That's very sporting because now I can give a slightly different answer. Okay so what have we actually seen, and let's link it also into copper switch off as well. Because if you live in a rural community, it is not impossible these days that you might be served by some kind of radio solution. Or you might even be dependent on your 2G or 3G signal, because you haven't got any other reliable means of doing it. Because under the new regulations, if BT want or Openreach wants to decommission an old exchange, it doesn't have the same duty to serve all the people on the new exchange, that it's just fibred up that it previously did. And what that means is the people that are most likely to suffer are actually the remotest in location terms from that exchange. So in actual fact, that makes the problem worse not better, and more expensive to fix. So let's look at 2G first of all. 2G does give you that excellent coverage. Okay, the difficulty in terms of spectral efficiency is well known, it's not the most efficient. However, I don't think that they can turn it off easily because the quality of the rest of the infrastructure in a rural area simply won't permit it. Now, I haven't seen that actually stated in a press release by anybody anywhere. But that's the real truth behind it. So you can't switch 2G off because it's such an elementary baseline and there's nothing else if you did, it would be a disaster. However, 3G you might be able to say that you could, because it sort of fits as a stall in my mind between what 2G has and what 4G has always promised, and actually begun to deliver in a good way. So 3G is the one you could switch off, but in so doing you're still going to impact people most and forgive me, but the one thing that we have in common on all of this is that when you're touching 2G, 3G, or copper, you are hitting which areas? Is it a) urban or b) rural? Ah, I think we know the answer to this one, don't we ladies and gentlemen? So my take on it is 2G I think will be left on. We've already seen 3G, I've heard you were talking about 2033 on 2G, I've heard dates of 3G switch off taking place within 24 months. Now, it might well be that government can set all the targets in the world, and regulators can set targets, wonderful things targets. And sometimes they even get hit. I'm not saying they won't be, I'm not saying they will be, I'm simply saying if 3G is going to get switched off in two years and they can switch off 2G more quickly then they will. They're already switching off copper. So in a sense, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of trying to help a rural community, it's all part of the same thing. On the one hand, we're being told that we're all going to get gigabit capable connectivity. On the other hand, it's not happening fast enough. And I actually feel deep concern, and support, and pity for BT UK I think they're trying to do a cracking job. They really are trying to make a difference. And their approach to open access and stuff is really good. But on the one hand, they're doing great work and on the other hand, it almost feels like Ofcom's given them a kicking, because what we're doing by changing what areas are not covered by what and when it doesn't seem to me that it's quite joined up. I'll leave it at that, because I think there's good intent on all sides. And of course, things will always evolve but my sympathies in this particular discussion will go to BT UK over Ofcom as to how legacy spectrum has been refarmed. Do I think it's necessary? Yes. Is it of limited supply? Well, we can debate that till the cows come home, literally, unless of course we begin to look at things like CBRS and expansion of spectrum sharing. Interfering with military capability. No, thank you, Dorset's largest employer is the military. You can't have something that might damage capability. But what you could do is look at improved sharing within existing bands that are there. And the big problem that rural areas have, if you go for a licence that you don't have to go to a mobile network to beg for because in reality, that is a form of licence called licence shared access, begging perhaps a strong word, but it is at their discretion, and rightly so because they paid for it. However, if you go for spectral new rights to Ofcom in a licensed band that they don't hold, my big complaint has always been that process has been far too manual. It's had a lot of errors in it. And it hasn't been adjusted quickly enough to enable the growth of the private networks that would have helped the rural areas more, and would have got those Ethernet connections in and might have speeded up my doubling of grain production, helping the local farm and enabling my granny in a home to have a haptic hug because I can't give her a real one. And those things actually really matter.

Rory

Yeah, absolutely. I was wondering, as a kind of a final question. We're talking in 2023. What do you think this situation will be like in say, five years? In 2028? Better or worse, or about the same?

Dave

I'd love to tell you that I thought it would be better. I think it may be slightly better. To some of its to some of that depends on how much we as individuals, and in particular in rural areas are prepared to make enough of a noise about it. Because within two years, there'll be a general election that will lead to inevitable change, we have changed within government departments. Now, I don't think on the government side that there's a lack of interest in trying to fix the problem. It may be a lack of understanding, it could be a lack of money. It's certainly sometimes the case of not being able to easily join up policy silos. So for example, one department might want to get better fibre connectivity to remote location for capability reasons, a farming, Defra may have a need to get capability to farms for other reasons. Be the UK might just want to improve gigabit broadband services to everybody. But they're all working to their agendas in the way that they work to the budgets they have, because they need to have some command and control. But the thing about 5g is it no longer respects those boundaries. If we could get to, in five years time, a place where we haven't been in a rural community penalised by 2G, 3G and copper switch off in the way that we are today. If we could see the mobile network operators doing their absolute level best to fill in current capacity gaps, even if we haven't fixed all the coverage and capacity gaps getting it better than it is or far better than SRM is promising. That will be helpful. I don't expect them to fund it, they're not charities and therefore I'd like to see Ofcom make more spectrum available on the shared access licencing side with higher power levels that would enable me to transmit beyond the foot of my damned mast. Because at the moment, that's a problem if we do those things, and we continue to remove the barriers to deployment in rural areas, and I think again, credit to DCMS as well. is doing some great work with the barrier dusting type busting task force, then Rory, the answer is on balance just about slightly better, but not a radical change. I fear, I hope we can get the radical change.

Rory

Well, it's something we could talk about for ages. But unfortunately, we have time for for this episode. So thank you very much for being on the show.

Dave

You're welcome. Thanks very much indeed.

Jane

As always, you can find links to all of the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website at itpro.co.uk.

Rory

You can also follow us on social media, as well as subscribe to our daily newsletter. Don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find podcasts. And if you're enjoying the show, why not tell a friend or colleague about us?

Jane

We'll be back next week with more from the world of IT, but until then, goodbye.

The conversation around UK connectivity is often dominated by the rollout of 5G, or the race for widespread gigabit broadband.

But many rural communities and businesses struggle with a lack of even basic connectivity such as reliable cellular service. This has severe consequences for rural businesses, holding back their growth while accelerating brain drain as younger people gravitate towards urban areas for education and employment.

Some groups have taken measures into their own hands to ensure they receive the connectivity they need. In this episode, Jane and Rory speak to Dave Happy, collaboration lead at 5GRuralDorset, to discuss the connection difficulties facing rural businesses and what is being done to help.

Highlights

“I cannot understand after 37 years why we still even have a digital divide, let alone on a scale which with the withdrawal of 2G, 3G, and copper switch off is actually going to be exacerbated not improved.”

“The loss to the rural economy of not having this fibre in place is infinitely greater and far more personal than people really understand.”

"I've heard dates of 3G switch off taking place within 24 months. Now, it might well be that government can set all the targets in the world, and regulators can set targets, wonderful things targets. And sometimes they even get hit. I'm not saying they won't be, I'm not saying they will be, I'm simply saying if 3G is going to get switched off in two years and they can switch off 2G more quickly then they will."

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• Cloud growth experiencing ‘slowdown’ amid rising economic disruption
• Cisco gets ahead of the herd with ‘connected cow’ app
• UK's first 6G research facility to open at the University of Sheffield
• Satellite broadband could turbocharge rural business connectivity
• Rural businesses face "digital exclusion" due to underinvestment in connectivity
• MediaTek announces new 5G mmWave chipset and Wi-Fi 7 platforms
• What is 5G and how far are we from rollout?
• Preparing for the 3G sunset: What your business should expect

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Remote businesses and homes across the UK will be connected to satellite broadband in a new government trial intended to address unequal coverage of high-speed internet.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) announced plans to test the effectiveness of satellites in delivering high-speed connectivity in “a dozen” sites considered ‘very hard to reach’, the less than 1% of rural and remote sites where the cost of delivering broadband rises to untenable levels.

Starlink, the satellite broadband arm of aerospace firm SpaceX, has been chosen to support the trial given its already extensive low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation.

For the future of the trial, the government will continue to evaluate other services, and named UK-based satellite operator OneWeb as a potential partner for connectivity in more complex locations.

Test sites include Snowdonia National Park, with the base of the Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation (Sefydliad Achub Mynydd Dyffryn Ogwen) and the Ty Cornel outdoor activity facility run by Scouts Cymru both participating. Rievaulx Abbey in North Yorkshire and Wasdale Head in the Lake District were also among the selected locations, while further sites are under review.

The tests will seek to establish the effectiveness of the satellites, as well as the specific benefits of faster connections in remote areas, such as improved communications for rescue teams.

The potential of satellite broadband for rural business connectivity is great, with initial government figures demonstrating that reliable connections as high as 200 Mbits/sec can be established using the technology.

Businesses have also registered interest in satellite solutions. In its response to a consultation on improving broadband for very hard-to-reach premises, published in May, the government stated that 43% of businesses had explored satellite broadband as an alternative to fixed broadband. A further 29% had tried both satellite broadband and fixed wireless access.

“High-speed broadband beamed to earth from space could be the answer to the connectivity issues suffered by people in premises stuck in the digital slow lane,” said Michelle Donelan, secretary of state for the DCMS.

“Ensuring everyone can get a quality internet connection is crucial to our levelling up plans and these trials aim to find a solution to the prohibitively high cost of rolling out cables to far-flung locations.”

In October, the government launched a £15 million competition to encourage UK businesses seeking to enter the satellite internet market, citing the great potential for innovation and job creation within the sector.

Alongside its satellite trial, the government is expanding its broadband outreach scheme Project Gigabit, and has awarded Northern Ireland-based broadband firm Fibrus a £108 million contract to improve fibre connectivity across Cumbria. Initial Fibrus connections are expected by the spring, with construction commencing immediately.

“Using innovative methods to beam broadband to isolated areas, alongside this latest Project Gigabit deal to level up the north of England, will connect thousands more hard-to-reach premises, helping people get and stay connected,” said James Cartlidge, exchequer secretary at the Treasury.

It is hoped that investment in the region will spur opportunities for employment and apprenticeships across Cumbria, and the government is additionally seeking to award contracts in areas such as Cornwall, Norfolk, and Suffolk.

SpaceX continues to launch Starlink satellites into orbit at pace, with its constellation now containing around 3,000 of an FCC-approved total of 12,000 that could eventually provide internet access for much of the world. The firm now has approvals to provide internet to moving vehicles, and has signed both a partnership with Royal Caribbean and a deal with T-Mobile to construct a satellite-based mobile network.

Satellite connectivity is undergoing a major expansion, benefiting from major investment from organisations such as SpaceX, OneWeb and DISH. SpaceX’s Starlink, for instance, now has more than 3,000 satellites in its constellation, while OneWeb has recently partnered with French satellite operator Eutelsat to boost its coverage. Public sector organisations, such as the EU and DARPA, are also getting in on the action, with the former set to launch a constellation this decade to serve Europe with 5G. The latter, meanwhile, has launched a competition to develop a satellite network to transmit encrypted communications.

Although the cost of launching a satellite may seem extortionate right now, when seen as part of a larger outlay that provides broad coverage, high investment might make sense. Each satellite can provide coverage for a very wide area, whereas fibre will never be able to reach every single customer; some businesses and households will always be too remote. Additionally, for areas lacking basic infrastructure, satellite deployments might arguably outpace the fastest cable laying operations.

The satellite broadband industry has jumped on this opportunity, and sees a great deal of potential in providing connectivity for difficult-to-reach customers, like people living on mountains or based in far-removed rural areas. Due to practical issues, and market forces, this customer base has traditionally suffered from unreliable coverage and slow speeds, while those based in major towns and cities have been able to get ahead.

Organisations like SpaceX, however, are hoping to be the remedy. Starlink, for instance, says its services provide internet for “remote and rural locations across the globe”, while OneWeb claims it “exists to remove the barriers to connectivity that are holding economies back”. The company highlights the widely publicised “digital divide” experienced by more than three billion people in rural and remote areas worldwide, pledging to bridge it in a way fibre optic cables haven’t yet been able to.

The dismal state of rural connectivity

Although cities seem like a natural home for major businesses, swathes of organisations operate in rural areas, with more employees than ever before also working from home on city outskirts or the countryside. Government figures show 23% of all registered businesses in England are based rurally (549,000), with remote areas host to more businesses per head than urban areas, excluding London.

Last year, Three’s head of government affairs, Simon Miller, argued the government was underserving rural organisations, despite continued full-fibre rollout. Even rural areas with a range of connectivity options face reduced speeds, too, with 2020’s average speeds in rural England standing at 51 Mbits/sec versus the urban figure of 84 Mbits/sec. Some businesses even lack services as basic as reliable mobile phone signal, preventing them from engaging in digital transformation or performing tasks like video conferencing.

The status quo is hugely frustrating, Dave Happy, 5G RuralDorset spectrum standards & security lead, tells IT Pro. “I find it chronically depressing that, after the sharp end of 37 years of deregulation, that we're even still having the discussion at all,” he says. “The notion that a rural community should be settling for just coverage and not adequate connectivity speeds is itself a concept founded on shaking and shifting sands.

“When you think about everybody now, using one-time pass codes for purchases online – I can’t, and 15% of the country, after 2025, may [still] have a similar problem. Is that the kind of world we want to live in? It’s a bigger failing and it could be addressed by policy decisions higher up, and I’d like to see a little bit more weight to those policy decisions.”

Could comprehensive satellite coverage alleviate these problems? Happy is quick to contest the claim satellite launches could provide coverage quicker than fibre for rural businesses, although low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites might play a role in future. He cites one provider that was deploying 50km of rural fibre a week, which has risen to nearly 70km. This organisation has four ploughs in operation and is directly burying the fibre.

Despite the ongoing rollout, though, communities not currently served by fibre optic cable can face quotes of tens of thousands of pounds to get lines brought out to them, or must wait until larger network operators see their area as profitable enough to recoup the cost. In comparison, satellite broadband customers can expect smaller setup and monthly fees — organisations in the United States, for instance, can get 350 MBits/sec for $500 per month, with a one-time setup fee of $2,500 through Starlink.

Ofcom’s role in spectrum allocation is key

In 2021, BT and OneWeb signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the intention of exploring LEO satellite communication for rural customers. This partnership will focus on improving capacity, mobile resilience, backhaul and building out coverage in challenging locations. The two firms will also consider ways to develop new services beyond the UK’s shores for BT’s global customers.

As things stand, the company expects high-altitude platform (HAP) systems to combine with LEO satellites, with the firm examining applications for LEO around resilience, such as backhaul backup in remote areas, according to a spokesperson. There are challenges, though, at play. Although LEO, on its own, offers a number of possibilities, there are capacity constraints that means it might not be practical in offering a ‘direct to customer’ option. Capacity constraints, specifically, could translate to spectrum rationing – particularly if Ofcom rules the increasingly crowded satellite market must directly compete with internet service providers (ISPs) for high-frequency millimetre wave (mmWave) bands above 24Ghz.

Little consensus has so far been reached over the rights of satellite operators within Europe. MmWave offers greater bandwidth and lower interference than other bands, which puts it in high demand for both satellite networking operators as well as for 5G usage by traditional network operators. Sharing issues, therefore, may occur above 40.5GHz, according to Aarti Holla-Maini, secretary general of the Global Satellite Operators Association (GSOA), which will mean requiring emission limits on 5G equipment. “We have urged Ofcom to ensure protection of satellite DL (40.5GHz – 42.5GHz) with separation distances, as well as protection of satellite UL (42.5GHz – 43.5GHz) satellite receivers from aggregate interference from 5G base stations.”

GSOA isn’t concerned allocation will necessitate spectrum rationing, with some groundwork having previously been laid. “This part of the band was foreseen for some years as a priority band for 5G by the EU anyway,” adds Holla-Maini. “But it’s potentially a deployment constraint because satellite operators will have to co-exist with 5G in urban areas, which might put constraints on where we can deploy gateway earth stations.”

Gateway earth stations are satellite dish hubs that send data from fibre networks to a constellation and to a user’s own receiver, and vice versa. They require adequate space, free of obstructions such as tall buildings or dramatic geographic features, as well as weather conditions conducive to good radio transmission – the same set of criteria required by telecoms infrastructure. Beyond interference caused by stations packed too closely, competition between operators could rear its head not through allocation, but the mundane problem of real estate on the ground. Urban areas could be particularly difficult to populate with infrastructure, both due to competition from existing 5G masts and reduced space.

Accessing untapped ultra-rural potential

While the debate over spectrum allocation rages on, rural businesses continue to suffer. Scotland, home to some of the leading lights of the UK tech sector, has stark differences in connectivity between cities and rural communities. “Scotland’s got some specific challenges – 98% of the land mass is classified as rural or ultra rural, which means that to start with they haven’t got the decent connectivity,” says Julie Snell, Scotland 5G Centre chair. “Trying to enable that has been a really big challenge, and the pandemic really brought it home.”

The Scottish government officially defines rural areas as “accessible” if they have a population of less than 3,000 within a 30 minute drive of a settlement containing 10,000 or more people, and either “remote” or “very remote” if the drive takes more than 30 mins. Snell notes there’s great potential among business in remote communities that isn’t currently being tapped, with 21% of the Scottish GDP coming from such rural areas, despite the fact they’re often poorly connected. Bridging the digital divide could hugely boost the economy.

“Satellites have absolutely got to be part of the solution in Scotland, which has now got a huge space industry,” Snell continues. “We are looking at it, and not just for Scotland, but any other really remote areas. It isn’t always necessarily about 5G – it’s about the best connectivity you can get. In some cases, it’s never going to be reached by wireless, and it’s never going to be reached cost-effectively by a fibre link. There are times when it’s going to be satellite.”

It’s clear satellite broadband offers a compelling story that makes it sound an ideal solution for rural customers’ woes. After all, if one relies on the market, there will likely always be businesses whose premises are too far removed for network infrastructure providers to justify running fibre to, without huge setup costs being passed onto the end-user. For several good reasons, it may be some years before UK businesses can make full use of satellite broadband, but, when deployed and utilised correctly, LEO satellites could prove a powerful and permanent antidote for underserved rural business.

Automated transcription software isn’t exactly new as an idea or a finished product. Most of the notable players in the market, like Otter, Trint and Temi came into prominence over the last ten years, with Rev launching as far back as 2010. All services that fall into this bracket are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), and promise the ability to do away with laborious and time-consuming manual transcription, creating fewer bottlenecks in business.

The need for accurate automated transcription in both the business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) worlds – as well as occupations like journalism – has been ever present, but this need isn’t being served as well as it can be. Far from any particular provider bearing the brunt of the guilt, the ecosystem as a whole is underserving customers for various reasons – from inadequacies in the technology to a lack of accessibility.

Picking apart the faults in AI transcription

Much of transcription software’s marketing is directed at businesses, with features that focus on picking out key moments from recordings and enabling collaboration. There’s another area, however, where these tools have chosen to focus their energy: accessibility.

Prior to these tools being available, transcription was often prohibitively expensive. Since Rev burst onto the scene in 2010, primarily focused on being a marketplace for freelancers to provide less expensive transcription than was available, the market has seen a large influx of venture capitalism cash. With newcomers like Airgram and Verbit garnering huge cash injections in initial funding rounds – $10 million and $23 million respectively in 2022 – it’s important the ecosystem begins to listen to the needs of their customers. Initial promises of lower costs, and greater access, seems like a reason to jump for joy – but there’s a catch.

Transcription software is notorious for generating errors, no matter how finely-tuned the AI is. One very high-profile example is on YouTube where the company has come under fire for removing a community captioning feature that allowed creators to lessen the burden of fixing the often clunky transcriptions provided by parent company Google.

Social media abounds with examples of poor transcriptions, all powered by various forms of AI, from the likes of major tech names like Facebook and TikTok. Many of these tools argue the solution is usage; the more diverse the user base, the more accurate the transcriptions are – and vice versa. While there are significant differences between companies, some offer multi-language support while others are far more geared towards English. What’s clear – even after just a cursory look at this segment of the market – is that it isn’t as open and shut as marketing would have you believe.

AI transcription’s accessibility problem

Improper captions are one reason why Svetlana Kouznetsova, a New York-based B2B accessibility strategy consultant who previously worked in web development, believes AI transcriptions are only fit for purpose when context is understood by all parties. She says people should be wary of deploying such tools in business environments and presuming all will be fine following implementation.

“I do not use auto-captions for work,” Kouznetsova, who has impaired hearing, says. “I use auto-captions mostly for informal conversations because auto-captions are often inaccurate, and it's more than just words. There are many small things to consider that machines cannot do, also it's important that captions are readable and understandable. Even if captions are accurate but not formatted or designed well they are hard to read.”

Kouznetsova says that as tools have rushed to herald their accessibility features, they have seemingly forgotten that context is key when trying to address accessibility in these spaces. She cites Otter, as an example, announcing an integration with Zoom in 2020 to provide live captioning. For her, it’s not just about which words can be spit onto the page, and in which order, but also about how transcriptions feed (or don’t feed) into readability.

“Many people don’t realise that those who can hear can fall back onto their good hearing, if text doesn't make sense to them. However, for us deaf people it's important that text is of good quality, otherwise it causes cognitive dissonance. I'm not against auto-transcribing tools. They may be useful for some situations. But they aren’t the best accessibility solution. It's like hiring a writer to write a book. The writer may do a great job writing a book. But if a book isn’t well designed, it's hard to read.”

Boosting the AI transcription ecosystem

Accurate transcription software might have played a hand reducing the gap between what the IT team thinks customers want and what they’re actually asking for, quips Michelle Symonds, who worked for the CITI Group in various roles, including IT project manager, for more than a decade, before founding her own UK-based SEO company.

“I think one really big issue then, and now, is that stakeholders and end-users make assumptions,” she explains. “IT professionals make assumptions, too, and they're not always the same assumptions. If you could have some record of that it might help to solve that sort of problem. It’s quite simply that IT people and business people, for want of a better word, don't speak the same language; that the IT people are thinking in a different way.”

Although there are problems, the quality of the technology has been improving over time, despite the fact that, for example, much of the software is anglo-centric. Using the technology also requires a significant amount of human intervention to sharpen up transcriptions generated from conversations. There might be hope on the horizon, though, in the form of more advanced technology branded Whisper, developed by OpenAI, which claims to recognise and translate audio at near-human levels. Should the likes of Whisper, or other ventures, live up to their potential, it could raise standards across the entire ecosystem.

As I crash into my 58th year on this planet, I am becoming more aware of the physical frailties of getting old. I am not getting old, of course. 60 is the new 40, according to my friends. They are too kind.

But we should be aware that the old viewpoint that ageing members of our society and workforce don’t use technology is going to come to a crashing halt soon. Those of us marching towards retirement are quite technology aware, and the old excuses don’t wash.

With age comes some, shall we say, “adaptations” of our abilities. For myself, having real-time glucose monitoring from the Libre, and now Dexcom G6, has been transformative technology for my insulin-injecting diabetes.

However, these are easy, mainstream solutions. We need to consider the impact of accessibility in the wider context. In a recent podcast, I sang about the merits of the Microsoft Surface Adaptation Kit. It costs a few pounds, it doesn’t have a record-smashing business processor or a high resolution screen. It's a set of stickers and raised/bumpy labels for you to stick on various items on your computer. It even comes with the stick-on pull tabs to make it easier to open up the screen, or pull out the foot.

The unfortunate reality is a lot of mainstream IT products are actually quite difficult to use if you have accessibility needs, and the addition of just a few little items like labels and pull tabs can be transformative. Full marks for Microsoft for putting together this kit, which is useful on any computer, and most certainly isn’t limited to the latest devices like the Microsoft Surface Pro 8, for instance.

All of this is a learning experience. My learning started when I was 20, when I spent a year working with a chap who was blind. Realising that I was his eyes in the lab was completely revelatory, and totally changed my perception of accessibility, and how to support people who have such needs. If I could wave a magic wand, teenagers wouldn’t go on a gap year but would spend time working in the community with people with accessibility needs.

We should remember that companies like Microsoft and Apple take accessibility incredibly seriously. You don’t see this work, simply because most people don’t need to look for these features. But the range and depth can be quite breathtaking. And don’t assume that this is done for profit. I’m reminded of the comment made by Apple CEO Tim Cook, in an interview nearly a decade ago: “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”

So I was delighted to see another wave of accessibility features coming from Apple. I know I could find similar work from Microsoft in Windows 11, but the Apple examples are to hand. For example, this morning I was looking through the Accessibility features in macOS, and found an item called “Enable Head Pointer” in the “Pointer Control” settings. This uses the camera in the laptop to work out where your head is, and then tracks your head movements. These movements are then used to drive the mouse pointer on the screen. To my astonishment, it just worked.

Or how about “Enable alternative pointer actions”, which allows Facial Expressions to be mapped to mouse clicks. I enabled “Smile” to map to “Left Click”, and it just works. I had no idea this sort of stuff was baked into the operating system.

How about using gestures to make actions? For example, I can use a range of movements to fire actions on my Apple Watch. Clench the fist to perform an action, or use double clench for a different action. How about pinch and double pinch, which could answer or end a phone call, take a photo, play or pause media playback, start or resume a workout? All of these can be detected by the watch and mapped to actions. Then there’s a huge array of zoom, magnifiers, audio support including screen reading through to mono-ing of stereo audio.

Some of the forthcoming features are simply astonishing, including using the LIDAR in your iPhone to enable door detection, for those who are blind or have low vision. It scans the room and works out where there are doors. Not only that, it can describe the door, and where it is, telling you whether it is open or closed, and whether it can be opened by pushing, turning a knob or pulling a handle. Door Detection can also read signs and symbols around a door, like a room number at an office. This combination of LIDAR, camera and machine learning is truly transformative, and all of this can be spoken to the user.

It soon becomes obvious that a whole heap of these functions are not just for those needing assistance, but for all of us. These aren’t features that should be hidden away behind an Accessibility menu item, but should be front and centre. I have come to think of the combination of my iPhone, Watch and CarPlay as an information and capability fabric. Any forthcoming augmented reality (AR) glasses will need to seamlessly fit into this fabric, and increase the capability of every part of the system.

It is time to bring this capability to the mainstream, and roundly criticise those apps, services and products that are unsupportive or downright hostile, because it affects everyone.

A record number of people will begin computer science degrees this year, with more women taking computing than any other university subject group.

Analysis of this year’s exam results in the UK found that the number of students placed on undergraduate degrees in computing across the country has increased by 7% when compared to last year, with just over 24,900 students due to start courses – the largest percentage increase of any subject.

The figures, compiled by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, also revealed that computer science degrees have seen a 20% increase in accepted applications from women since 2019, which is also a higher increase than any other subject group listed by UCAS.

When it comes to A level entries, Computing has also shot up 41% across England, Northern Ireland and Wales in the last three years – the highest increase of any subject, BCS said.

“From autonomous vehicles, to media and communications, to banking and health care, we are in a digital society and computing skills are amongst the highest in demand,” commented Julia Adamson, Director of Education at BCS.

“So, it’s exciting that more young people have opted for advanced studies in computing at university - and particularly important to report a continued growth in the number of young women represented and achieving the highest grades.”

However, BCS has cautioned that the overall number of women that had accepted applications for computing, around 4,830, remains low when compared to men (20,080). This means that male students continue to outnumber women by 4.2:1 this year – only a slight improvement from 4.7:1 in 2019.

Despite this, female students continue to outperform their male counterparts at A level, with 38.8% achieving an A* or A, compared with 34.4% of men. That’s a considerable rise on both counts, with the comparative figures from 2019 showing that 18.7% of women and 17.4% of men hit those same grades that year.

Charlene Hunter MBE, CEO of Coding Black Females and member of the BCS board, commended the figures but warned against any potential complacency.

“It’s great to see young women choosing to take computer science in record numbers, but we can’t be complacent at all,” she said.

“In a world where big challenges like climate change and cyber security require highly skilled technologists, we need ever greater numbers of people from a diverse range of backgrounds to see computer science as an ethical, aspirational career choice.”

It’s easy for accessibility on the web to feel like a new phenomenon, but some of the oldest accessibility resources date back more than 20 years. Created by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have become integrated into many legislative decisions when it comes to web accessibility, including in the UK.

WCAG has changed and been adapted over the years – the highest level of compliance is WCAG 2.1 AA, with WCAG 2.2 currently slated for release in September 2022. They have a long history, though, and are reasonably complicated. We track how WCAG has evolved through the years, and why incorporating ease of use into the fabric of web design is essential for businesses in the modern age.

What are the origins of WCAG?

Geoff Freed has been working in web accessibility since the early days of the movement. He now works as director of Perkins Access Consulting – an arm of the Perkins School for the Blind, one of the oldest institutions of its kind in the US.

Freed served as an expert during the development of the first set of guidelines, before becoming a contributor to the second set. He’s also a co-author on the time text markup language (TTML), which is used by media giants like Netflix and Amazon to provide captioned content. In short, the industry veteran says – in the early days – incorporating these guidelines into any kind of legislation wasn’t on the table.

“When the first version of the guidelines were published, it's not as if suddenly the crowds broke and the sun began to shine through. It's more like in the industry we now had a set of recommendations, which is what they were and remain. We now had a set of formal recommendations that we could say to people, ‘Hey, look there are real practices that you can do to make something more accessible’.”

Has WCAG been integrated into legislation?

Like almost every disability access standard, the worldwide implementation of these guidelines has taken a long and winding road. WCAG was first published in 1999, and is key to the role of the US’ section 508 – which is part of 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits US federal agencies and contractors from discriminating against disabled people.

Section 508 was amended in the late 90s to add content to the terms covered by the act. In the US, lawsuits have played a key role in advancing web accessibility, often in tandem with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) complaints. The same, though, cannot be said of the UK.

In the UK, the WCAG are quasi-integrated into the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018. Those regulations came after an EU directive and follow the European standard for digital accessibility called EN 301549, which are harmonised with the WCAG.

Prior to the regulations, much of the web accessibility requirements applicable to Britain stemmed purely from the 2010 Equality Act and 1995 Disability Discrimination Act in Northern Ireland. EN 301549 is what applies to public entities with ISO 30071-1, an international standard, being the code that applies to organisations outside of the public sphere. The latter is not a law, though it does relate to the equality act. Got all that?

Despite the inherent confusion created when accessibility is considered internationally, Freed likens the applicability of WCAG as akin to other tech compatibility issues throughout history. “It means that we avoid the Betamax/VHS problem as much as possible when things are standardised,” he comments.

How much of the web complies with WCAG?

If you’re compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA, then you’re also following the UK’s rules, but with any type of guidelines the inevitable question is: how well are they being abided by? According to US-based Web AIM’s 2022 analysis, 96.8% of the web’s top websites had some form of WCAG flaw on their homepage. The most common being a lack of low contrast text, missing alt text, missing form labels, empty buttons, and missing document language. While these numbers seem daunting – and they are – the report notes that 21.6% had five or fewer errors.

Josh Koenig, co-founder of web operations platform Pantheon, says that accessibility is one of the facets of IT infrastructure that tends to be a casualty of other elements “breaking at scale.”

“What happens to people when they start to reach that scale is that governance breaks down. Once governance breaks down, it's just a matter of time until accessibility goes off the rails somewhere,” Koenig says. He adds that, generally speaking, he sees large companies falling into two camps: those who create access because they’re legally required to; and those who do so because it’s part of their core mission.

Broadly, he sees institutions like universities being more likely to follow accessibility guidelines as opposed to business entities who are rarely, at least in the UK, absolutely required to follow the same level of access as publicly funded entities. More than that, though, Koenig sees an industry that’s foundationally lagging when it comes to understanding accessibility as part of the way of doing business. He would know; Pantheon is used by companies ranging from Google and Harvard, to the United Nations and Doctors Without Borders.

“Our industry – a lot of it is still stuck in this kind of old-world ‘wait for the relaunch’ kind of mindset to make material improvements,” he continues. “That’s not a great way to approach accessibility, because you need to be able to make those incremental improvements; because a lot of these things, they're small. You're not going to fix it with a big redesign, you're going to have to make steady progress on it over time.”

Why 100% WCAG compliance isn’t the end goal

Freed says when he started out in the industry as a captioner in the mid-1980s, teaching about accessibility was part and parcel with his profession. He says providing insight is still key to increasing access on the web today.

“The percentage of websites that are accessible online, and by accessible I don't mean 100% accessible because that's an impossible standard to achieve, but that are accessible by design online is probably a rather small percentage of all the materials that are available. But it's a growing percentage – and education has a lot to do with that.”

Part of the reason 100% compliance isn’t the end goal, Freed continues, is because compliance doesn’t always equal usability. If your website doesn’t have video, for example, then you’re not going to have captioned content. Theoretically, you haven’t checked that box as far as the guidelines are concerned, but your website might be perfectly usable.

“Just because you can't achieve 100% doesn't mean that what you can achieve is worthless,” Freed says. “The goal is not 100% conformance. And one of the reasons I say that is because you can have a website that checks all the boxes for meeting criteria in WCA. But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's usable by everybody.”

Koenig says that, from his point of view, education about accessibility is less about what your average new developer understands about access, and more about how those in management understand its importance. He likens this trend of pushing more and more developers to understand accessibility to “drinking from a firehose of information”.

“It’s more about having accessibility be a part of the practice, which means management needs to be bought into it and everything else,” he says, “and also that your design [begins] with accessibility in mind.

“At the beginning you totally need this way to constantly improve and iterate to keep up because accessibility is a moving target, but also when you eventually do some kind of redesign. If your designers are savvy about accessibility, they can probably improve some things, but this also starts you off in a place where maintaining or continuing to improve accessibility over time is much easier.”

Freed says the industry needs to understand, at all levels, that accessibility isn’t a niche concern. It’s fundamental to an optimal web environment. “Accessibility isn’t just something that developers and designers do, it's something that needs buy-in from the very highest levels of your organisation,” he says. “One way to get that buy-in is to stress that accessible design is for everybody – not just for people who are blind, or people who are deaf or have mobility disabilities. It's for everybody.”

The UK government has launched a £12 million 'regulators and pioneers' fund to unlock innovation across the country and tackle pressing issues such as the cost of living and regional inequality.

Regulators and local authorities are able to tap into the fund to create initiatives that support entrepreneurs in the building and deploying of new products and services, which in turn will open up more job opportunities and stimulate economic growth.

With innovation-friendly regulation, the government hopes to boost its plans to become a global science and technology superpower. It wants to do this by bringing together the regulatory bodies with the technologists so that the latter will have a better chance of keeping pace with cutting-edge innovation.

Each successfully pitched project will receive £1 million from the fund, with the government particularly keen to hear initiatives that are aimed at tackling the cost of living, aiding the transition to net zero or that support its levelling up agenda.

The government hasn't explicitly said what types of technology it expects to harness with the funding, although it did cite examples from previous funding rounds, such as drone delivery schemes for vaccines. It added that those funding rounds have led to "significant achievements" across a number of sectors.

The examples listed also include crash-protected containers for delivery drones, adaptive algorithms for medical devices, frameworks for the use of technology in the legal sector, and the creation of innovation hubs that unblock legislative and regulatory barriers to innovations "like flying taxis".

Applicants have until 29 September 2022 to send in their proposals.

I feel like having a rant; an educated and observed rant but a rant nonetheless. The good news is that I’m fully aware of how futile ranting is without also offering solutions.

I can’t imagine anyone reading this will not have come across the phrase “diversity and inclusion” over the past 18 months. The extent to which the business world has identified the need for greater diversity has accelerated exponentially and every organisation that wants to remain relevant is now (or at least should be) on a journey to become more inclusive.

Saying that, how much has really changed? What impact have all these *good intentions* and *great conversations* had on the working experience of marginalised groups?

Diversity in tech is a well-trodden path, both the needs and the challenges are there for all to see, but again change is painfully slow. Working with leadership teams I meet with a variety of people with a variety of job titles, some of which occupy senior technical roles from CTOs to engineering heads to lead architects and I’ve noticed a worrying trend amongst this part of the organisation.

Tech leaders need to stop being passengers

Not enough is being done and too often external factors that are beyond one's immediate control are used as easy and lazy excuses for the lack of progress, such as Brexit and COVID-19. The culture within technical departments is often less than ideal. Problematic banter and microaggressions often exist beneath the service. Efforts to change are undertaken with a performative air of compliance rather than real belief.

To cap this all off, too many leaders in technical roles don't involve themselves in the motivational reasoning of this work and subsequent strategy. This is usually left to other “more people-focused” departments, because, for tech leaders, “the day job is what really matters”. And yes, that’s a real quote.

Let’s deal with the excuses first, I’ve heard all of these in the past 12 months. Why does tech still lack diversity?

• The talent just isn’t out there
• They don’t apply for the roles
• It’s because of the education system
• The local area is not very diverse
• It takes too much time to hire people who are different

Now, I don’t doubt that there is some truth in these excuses and at surface level they seem perfectly valid reasons for a lack of progression. My response is usually: well, what did you expect? This isn’t a quick fix type of issue. You don’t decide one day to make your organisation more inclusive and the next day it’s done. Treat the barriers like you would treat any business problem, don't just give up and say it's “too hard”. Instead, here are my own bullet points:

• Be honest about the reasons you’re doing this
• Set SMART objectives
• Budget appropriately
• Assign accountability and ensure this is felt
• Track and communicate progress
• Reward and recognise individuals who achieve

It does take time but it all stems from the first item in the list above. The organisations that I work with that get this right are crystal clear about the reasons they are choosing to focus on creating a more diverse and inclusive culture.

Is the tech industry still a boys’ club?

The question is, are you still part of a boys’ club? To be more specific and purposefully provocative, a white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied, university educated, middle class boys’ club. Now I know plenty of people with differing identities than those I just mentioned work within the sector, but who feels most at home? Who feels most comfortable? Who is the majority? Who is catered for most? Who sees people like them in the roles they aspire to? Crucially, who occupies the most senior roles?

The majority set the day-to-day culture where banter and jokes pass the time. What is harmless fun for some can make others feel excluded, marginalised and even persecuted.

The same is true for microaggressions. If you’re not sure what I mean by microaggressions, the Merriam Webster dictionary definition reads: “A comment or action that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally expresses a prejudiced attitude toward a member of a marginalised group”.

There are many types of microaggressions and they are often specific to a particular marginalised group. In typical male-dominated spaces, women face routine objectification or have assumptions made about their capability based on their gender. Disabled people face microaggressions on a day-to-day basis whether it’s people linking a physical disability with intelligence or simply holding a meeting in a non-accessible room. People of colour will be familiar with a range of microaggressions. As someone with brown skin, one microaggression that I have experienced frequently is the following interaction:

Stranger: Where are you from?

Me: I’m from London

Stanger: No, where are you really from?

To translate – you can't possibly be from London because you’re not white. When this happens for the first and second time, you’ll probably answer the questions they’re really asking – about my family heritage and history. When this happens again and again, it makes you feel like an outsider and that you don’t belong here. Rather than explicit and socially unacceptable racism it's more death by a thousand cuts.

In the not-too-distant past, I hosted a diversity and inclusion workshop for an organisation and microaggressions came up as a discussion point. I shared the “where are you really from” personal experience and the founder no less felt the need to question my experience and defend all the individuals that have ever said this to me.

Consultants tip: When someone from a marginalised group tells you they have been subjected to a microaggression, believe them.

I can tell you from experience that if you haven't done the work to educate people of what microaggressions are, what the impact is and what you should do – they will be present in your business every day. If inappropriate banter or microaggressions exist then any efforts to diversity a team are wasted. The culture will drive away anyone who doesn’t fit in with the majority,

Now, no-one wants to be the fun police and strip all humanity from the workplace so that is why there is a huge importance to educate and train. So many issues stem from a lack of self-awareness and lack of appreciation of the impact actions might have on others.

Ticking the box

Perhaps the most damaging and challenging issue I’ve seen concerns performative attitudes towards greater diversity and inclusion resulting in tokenistic actions.

Rarely have I seen tech departments or tech leaders be prominent in the diversity and inclusion conversation within the wider organisation. More often, I’ve witnessed these departments receive instructions and then follow them because of compliance rather than any true belief. Efforts to diversify teams are done for the optics and any change is surface level.

To really succeed here, to create sustainable change you need to have a full understanding of your motivation for this work. This needs to be factored into the objectives and strategy so in those tough times (and there will be tough times) rather than turning to the easy excuses your base level motivation will keep things going.

For the individuals I’ve worked with, I’ve seen numerous motivational elements combine to make this work sustainable. Broadly speaking, there are three main areas to explore:

Moral and social imperative

Start with acknowledging that there are inequalities in this world and don’t accept this state of affairs. Driven by empathy and selfless actions, this should be the foundation of your motivation.

Business and commercial necessity

Future talent, product diversification, customer and client expansion, innovation and creativity – all are aided by greater workforce diversity. Sometimes motivation to pursue greater diversity and inclusion needs to be supported by the fact that it drives the bottom line.

Personal connection

How are you and the people you care about affected by inequality and discrimination? Exploring personal connections can often give the resolve and passion needed. My recommendation is to explore all three of these motivational factors and detail, with specifics, your particular motivational mix.

Raising IT voices

All sounds easy right? There’s still a hurdle to clear, one that I’ve seen evidence of in the majority of organisations that I’ve worked with (with the exception of those that are part of the tech industry). This hurdle is another form of inequality, albeit one less associated with an individual's core identity.

All too often I’ve seen senior tech voices in organisations ignored, downplayed and excluded when it comes to strategic conversations that cut across the whole business (such as diversity and inclusion). Within most organisations there exists an unspoken departmental hierarchy, where some departments and their leaders have more influential voices and perceived importance than others. Usually, it’s the client or consumer-facing roles, the revenue generating roles and the creative roles that have this privilege. Operational and service departments are often incorrectly seen as lesser.

To counter this bias sometimes you’re going to have to shout a little louder and force your way into conversations. Another approach to take is to demonstrate success and progress in your own department, which can be a blueprint to success elsewhere in the organisation.

I want to finish off with a request, or a call to action of sorts through guided reflection. Take a moment to think about a time when you were excluded at work; maybe it was for a moment, maybe it was for much longer. Hold that thought. How did it make you feel? What happened? How did it affect your performance? Now think about if *being excluded* was a challenge you faced every single day.

Do something about this, explore your own motivations for a more diverse and inclusive workplace and crucially follow through with actions.

Rant over.

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Regional leaders have hit out at the government over a lack of support for much-needed networking and connectivity projects, branding current initiatives such as the Levelling Up agenda as “hot air”.

Mayors across the North of England have said that despite receiving promises of ‘EU-level funding’ for key projects, only a fraction of this has been delivered to date.

Connectivity remains a major issue across many regions in the UK and in West Yorkshire. Tracey Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire said 4% of her constituents are considered digitally excluded – an unequal level of access to widely used technology.

The region requires funding to support ongoing initiatives like 100% Digital in Leeds, which aims to tackle digital exclusivity, a key contributing factor of which is affordable connectivity, but it speaks to wider weaknesses in the central government’s Levelling Up agenda, the Mayor argued.

Speaking at the Connected North 2022 conference held in Manchester this week, Brabin said the disappointing levels of attention and investment from the UK central government for schemes like 100% Digital and Born in Bradford, simply echo long-held beliefs in West Yorkshire that they "never get anything anyway".

This is despite having a wealth of opportunities in the region, such as having two of its towns and villages named in the UK’s ‘top place to live’ lists and having a major broadcaster in Channel 4 moving its headquarters to the region, she said.

The government’s Levelling Up agenda is part of a broad programme aimed at bringing better opportunities to regions outside of London. Part of this programme is to create equal access to technology, particularly the internet, and develop a better-connected nation.

However, although the agenda has been widely touted by Westminster, the reality is that “no-one really knows what it is”, according to Steve Rotherham, Mayor of the Liverpool City Region.

Rotherham said wealthier and more infrastructure-rich regions in the UK are being offered more funding than the less advanced regions, something that is contributing to the digital exclusion in the North West.

Ultimately, according to Rotherham, the government’s support is not doing enough to tackle digital exclusion, particularly in areas where the cost of living crisis is being felt the hardest.

The Liverpool City Region has experienced cases of young people and their families being unable to afford the cost of Internet access. In many of these areas, the cheapest £14 Internet tariff is considered an expense for some and an inability to access the Internet is depriving young people of opportunities in education and eventually later in life, the Mayor argued.

By the government’s own admission, the way in which the ‘pots’ of money being allocated to each local region in the UK, known as The UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF), has been met “broadly negatively” by devolved administrations.

The UKSPF, alluded to by both Brabin and Rotherham, is a fund designed to reduce the inequality between regional communities and is part of the government’s wider Levelling Up agenda.

“The UK Shared Prosperity Fund could have helped us all do lots of things that we all need to do and nobody's certain of the distribution methodology because it's so opaque,” Rotherham said.

“It means that areas like Liverpool City Region have lost out, and people will remember that it was a manifesto pledge by the government – the Tory party – to say that no area will get less with the UK shared prosperity fund than the European Structural funds. But, it’s obviously untrue because you can go across the country to see those disparities.”

Brabin added that, in local government, all the funding that comes from Westminster “feels like a metaphorical pat on the head, that we should be grateful to get anything from government”.

“In the upcoming local elections, we can expect to see more people voice their displeasure with the execution of the government’s levelling up agenda,” Brabin said.

Councillor Bev Craig, leader at the Manchester City Council, agreed that more needs to be done in order to meet the aims of the Levelling Up agenda, adding that the programme seems like a re-hashing of previous ideas like the Northern Powerhouse.

“I think what we need to see, and we need to see this quite quickly over the next 12 months, is the levelling up agenda actually translating across the rest of Whitehall,” said Craig. “If this is simply the [DCMS], it becomes a department for gimmicks unless it challenges the Treasury, unless it challenges how other departments operate, then it's something that will be, I think, quickly confined to history, just as quick as local industrial strategies were.

Craig added that local authorities need to be pushing for single pots of funding and the removal of ‘Whitehall boundaries’ in government departments. She also argued that the government needs to “step up to the plate” and help each authority deliver the connectivity projects it wants to.

More than two in three (69%) IT employers are struggling to recruit new staff members with adequate digital skills, according to recent research from Open University.

The survey found that three quarters (77%) of the 425 senior UK IT decision-makers claimed that they are currently facing a digital skills gap in their organisation.

Digital skills are in high demand due to the range of benefits that they can offer to an organisation. Almost one in two (48%) of surveyed IT employers believe that digital skills will increase their business’ profitability, while 46% see them as a way of improving productivity within the business and making the company more competitive in the marketplace (45%).

Despite this, 57% of employers claim that their organisation doesn’t invest enough in digital skills.

While struggling to recruit adequately-skilled staff, half (48%) of the UK-based IT decision-makers believe that upskilling their current employees would help them avoid expensive new hires.

However, 62% of the respondents admitted that they are also finding it difficult to upskill their current employees with the digital skills required for their organisation. This includes cyber security, which is the most in-demand skill lacked by 42% of organisations, as well as software development (36%) and network engineering (24%).

Commenting on the findings, the Open University’s director of Apprenticeships and Higher Technical Qualifications (HTQs) Jacky Hinton said that the survey “shows that it can be challenging to recruit staff into digital roles and keep existing employees up to date with relevant digital skills” as organisations’ reliance on digital capabilities increases.

Hinton described HTQs as “a new route to provide the skills needed to close some of these critical gaps in organisations”.

“Approved by the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, they have been developed in collaboration with employers against particular occupational standards. The Open University is proud to be one of the first institutions to offer HTQs in network engineering and software development, which as the results show, are some of the roles that employers lack and are finding it challenging to recruit for,” she added.

The findings come five months after the UK reached an “all-time high” in the digital skills shortage, including a major shortage of talent in cyber security, big data analytics, and technical architects.

The Micro:bit Educational Foundation, the Scottish government, and domain registry Nominet will donate 57,000 BBC micro:bit devices to 3,000 primary schools in a bid to improve digital literacy skills across the UK.

First unveiled in 2015, the pocket-sized device is a single-board computer designed by the BBC to help schoolchildren engage with and learn about coding and software development.

Every primary school in Scotland, as well as an additional estimated 1,000 primary schools in England, Northern Ireland, and Wales will receive around 20 devices each, with 22,000 devices prioritised for institutions needing additional support the most.

Alongside the 57,000 BBC micro:bit devices, schoolchildren will also receive comprehensive teaching resources and online Continuing Professional Development courses, the Micro:bit Educational Foundation announced on Wednesday.

The initiative comes amid an "all-time high" shortage of talent in cyber security, big data analytics and technical architects.

What's more, research by Vodafone found that digital literacy is becoming as important as reading and writing for young people’s future life prospects. One in two UK 18-24-year olds have limited access to a laptop, tablet or PC, which leads to difficulties in attending online lessons or exams, applying for jobs, and gaining the necessary digital skills for many of today’s roles.

School equipment shortages tend to contribute to the problem, with Nominet research finding that 3 in 5 teachers cited lack of resources as a barrier to teaching computing and digital skills.

Commenting on Wednesday’s announcement, Micro:bit Educational Foundation CEO Gareth Stockdale described digital literacy and computational skills as “critically important not only to the future of our society, but to the future of children who will one day shape that society”.

“They are increasingly important core skills, and we know that the earlier you learn them, the better. The BBC micro:bit has become an essential tool that teachers and students alike have come to love. We’ve seen fantastic adoption in secondary schools, and we’re delighted to support and empower even more teachers to unlock children’s creative potential at primary level,” he said.

Nominet CTO Adam Leach added that the rollout will allow “more primary schoolchildren to explore and develop their skills in digital creativity and computing”.

“Each one of the 57,000 devices will impact on developing children’s core digital skills as citizens of a digitalised world – and perhaps even put some of them on a pathway to help fill the digital skills gap in the UK’s digital workforce of the future,” he said.

Deliveries of the micro:bit devices will begin in April 2022.

Lenovo has pledged to raise £1 million from laptop sales to combat digital poverty across the UK and Ireland.

The announcement is an expansion of its digital equity programme, which now includes allocating £1 from each laptop it sells to help local authorities, charities, and educational institutes deliver hardware and expertise to the most vulnerable in the UK.

Lenovo said it wants to ensure "technology, time and money" reach those most in need. As such, the company will also be offering its expertise to local charities that are working towards the same goal to help build a "sustainable digital society" through community support and better access to technology.

Four UK organisations have been selected by Lenovo for the programme: disadvantaged children at the St Patrick's Football Club in Dublin will receive educational devices and IT skills training from Lenovo. The Free At Last Birmingham Community organisation will be supplied with devices and community-based skills training for families in the area that have no connectivity.

The company will also offer support for National Digital Skills coaches with devices for disadvantaged citizens via the Ability Net UK charity. The SCC Academy in Solihull will also get access to desktops and monitors for a new academy in the area that will support IT training through the Rigby foundation.

"As one of the world's leading technology companies, we are on a mission to help reduce digital poverty and ensure that there are equal opportunities for all," said Jane Ashworth, Lenovo's SMB and channel director for the UK and Ireland. "By working with local expert charities and giving money, technology and expertise, we will fight to help improve digital equity in the UK."

The UK's digital divide

Lenovo is not the first company to highlight the issue of digital poverty, particularly in the UK. Current government data suggests that 82% of all advertised jobs now require some form of digital skill, at a time when a quarter of vulnerable children in the UK are unable to access "suitable" devices for education, according to Ofcom.

The issue has also been compounded by the pandemic, with multiple national lockdowns highlighting our reliance on the internet for work and education, according to Cambridge University researchers, Hannah Holmes and Dr Gemma Burgess. Children living in poverty are already significantly disadvantaged compared to their wealthier peers, but the university's research also suggests that of those eligible for free school meals, or who have been in care or adopted from care, only 25% achieved grades 9-5 in GCSE English and Maths in 2019, compared with 50% of all other pupils.

Discussion of digital exclusion often focuses on vulnerable children or the elderly, but according to the research from Cambridge University, it is not a specific generational problem. This was also pointed out by The Good Things Foundation, which told IT Pro last year that the UK's government had "not invested a single extra pound on adult digital inclusion".

Artur Ortega has seen many development tools come and go during his almost 30 years in the IT industry. He’s a visually-impaired software architect who’s previously worked for companies including the Telegraph and Yahoo. Now head of platform architecture for Babylon Health, Ortega says what drew him to the field was his connection to technology before becoming blind at 17.

“At the time, computers were, for me, the only real option for accessible access to information to books and so on,” he says. “Those were the early times of text-to-speech, and so, for me, it was a natural avenue for my profession.”

Ortega went on to study for a master’s degree in computer science. He says those early days, though, were marked by the same cycle he sees now when it comes to accessibility: two steps forward, one step back. First came simple text editors – easy for a screen reader, a tool that allows a blind user to have what’s on-screen read back to them, to manage – then integrated development environments (IDEs) came to pass, the majority of which weren’t accessible.

With tools like Microsoft Visual Studio, too, came other issues, namely, browsers used to input code not being accessible themselves. Ortega says part of the reason these cycles repeat is because of the lack of visibly disabled IT professionals in the industry. “We're having these similar cycles where developers, because the tools probably weren't that useable, never knew other developers who were disabled.”

Artur Ortega (pictured) says the industry needs more visibly disabled IT professionals

You can go your own way

One of Ortega’s industry colleagues is Saqib Shaikh, a visually impaired Seattle-based engineer at Microsoft. He says, in his personal opinion, while the industry has moved forward when it comes to accessibility in the last 20 years, there’s still a fair way to go. “There have been great people across the industry working on accessibility and educating people,” he tells IT Pro, “yet, I still hear from people who are blocked from a job because applications they need to use aren’t accessible.”

Ortega agrees, saying it goes beyond the tools that are used to build programmes, and into the very workflow of a software developer. From ticketing systems to architecture and diagram boards, Ortega points to specific tools like Atlassian Jira and Confluence where he says “retrofitted accessibility” leaves the usability of the products lacking.

One Shaikh created himself is Seeing AI, which has gone on to be part of Microsoft’s offerings. Launched in 2017 for English users, and recently updated to include five other languages, the app was conceived at a company hackathon. That’s fitting, Shaikh explains, given his approach to life as a blind person is similar to a hacker; he solves personal accessibility problems as they appear.

“That was the moment when I thought, “you know, my being blind is part of who I am; being into emerging technologies is what I'm excited about”. You bring these two things together, and there was this natural intersection of, “how do we use artificial intelligence (AI) to help people who are blind?”.”

Branded as a “talking camera for the blind”, Seeing AI has multiple channels to support a user in completing tasks like reading short pieces of text, using a bar scanner to identify products, describe people’s faces, and correctly identify currency. There are also previewed channels, which allow users to identify a colour in their space, or facts about their current environment.

“I wanted to blend in”

As for how Ortega works around accessibility roadblocks within his day-to-day workflow, he uses tools like the NVDA screen reader alongside the speech synthesiser Eloquence, which allows him to listen back very quickly. This combination also plays back every element of the code he’s working on, so he doesn’t have to worry that his tools will try to make a coherent sentence out of his technical work.

Despite the myriad of tools at their disposal, however, both Ortega and Sheikh return repeatedly to the need for more disabled people in the industry. US Department of Labor figures show the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is roughly twice that of people without. People with disabilities across all levels of education, too, were much less likely to be employed than their counterparts with no disability. In addition, for those within the IT industry, 37% feel uncomfortable disclosing their disability at work due to fears of discrimination, according to National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and KPMG research.

When asked about previous mentors, Sheikh says while identifying with a disability is “very personal”, his goal was to not draw attention to himself. At the beginning of his career, for instance, he chose to reveal his blindness at the latter stages of any job application process.

“I guess it’s just my nature,” he explains. “I just wanted to be part of them. I wanted to blend in.” Now, though, he hopes employers understand disabled people have a set of skills that’s of incredible value to the IT Industry.

“Someone who lives day in day out with a disability is probably an expert at their own situation and has probably got a toolbox of workarounds that you can't even imagine.”

For Ortega, the message is similar. The more disabled people you hire, he explains, the more likely your products are to be accessible, and the more the cycle can develop positively.

“Just going into the office and other engineers seeing you have a disability means they reflect on the software they're creating. I had a situation where I've come into the office and other engineers that I didn't know were approaching me and apologising for the inaccessible software they'd developed.”

His reply – with a laugh attached: “I agree – you have the chance to change it as well. Now.”

Intel and Barclays will provide 550 laptops to teachers at schools in the UK’s most disadvantaged communities, as part of a new initiative to close the digital divide.

The supply is part of the Tech4Teachers project under the non-profit Digital Poverty Alliance, and aims to help teachers of more than 20,000 UK schoolchildren overcome inadequate online access.

As part of the project, Intel and Barclays will also launch a collaboration room for participating teachers to share best practices, ask questions, and seek guidance.

Despite numerous efforts to close the digital divide among students, CEO of the Digital Poverty Alliance and the Learning Foundation, Paul Finnis, believes that teachers have been left behind. According to the non-profit’s findings in 2021, almost one in two (47%) UK teachers lacked the adequate technology to effectively teach their pupils.

According to Finnis, equipping teachers with suitable hardware is “vital in supporting pupils and ultimately building the necessary digital skills to tackle digital poverty”.

“Teachers must not be forgotten by the Government or industry in efforts to ‘level-up’. How can we support children to learn how to use devices and develop digital skills if their teachers don’t have suitable technology to teach them?” he added.

Commenting on the announcement, Barclays chairman Nigel Higgins said that, despite the UK “starting to emerge from the most acute stage of the crisis”, many people are still impacted by the challenges of the pandemic.

Higgins announced that Barclays would be extending its 100x100 UK COVID-19 Community Relief Fund for a second time, having originally launched the programme in May 2020.

This will allow Barclays to “support 250 UK grassroots charities in their crucial work in our local communities” as well as finance Barclays’ share of the donated laptops.

The first iteration of the Tech4teachers programme in 2021 saw electrical retailer Currys provide 1,000 laptops for teachers and teaching assistants at schools across the UK.

However, not every hardware donation initiative has been successful. In January 2021, the UK government was criticised for providing vulnerable children with laptops infected with a "self-propagating network worm". The Windows-based devices were found to be infected with Gamarue.1, a worm Microsoft identified in 2012.

The Australian government has allocated $6.7 million (£3.5 million) in additional funding to expand programmes that address the under-representation of women in STEM.

The government's Advancing Women in STEM Strategy was originally launched in 2019 at a time when women across the country made up only 28% of workers in STEM. This was later updated with the 2020 Action Plan, which aims to produce an Australian society that provides equal opportunity for people of all genders to work in STEM.

The latest funding will be divided over a handful of programmes, including $2 million over four years to extend the Superstars of STEM programme, delivered by Science and Technology Australia (STA). This is an initiative that boosts the profile of women in STEM by equipping them with advanced communication skills and opportunities in media, schools, and on stage.

The programme states it aims to grow a critical mass of celebrity women scientists to inspire future generations. The new funding will help it develop an additional 120 women into future leaders in the STEM sector and help boost their public profiles.

The Women in STEM ambassador has also been given $2.4 million over two years to ensure her work continues until 2025-26. The role was established in 2018 to advance gender equity in STEM in Australia, and is currently occupied by inaugural ambassador professor Lisa Harvey-Smith.

The ambassador works on a national scale to raise awareness of issues that can hold girls and women back from STEM study and work, and aims to increase their participation in the sector.

Lastly, an additional $2.3 million over four years will be used to expand the ambassador’s Future You programme. This helps 8-12 year olds envision a future for themselves in STEM by showcasing diverse role models and career pathways. The government said it has reached 3.1 million children, parents, and carers across the country since it launched in October 2020.

“Supporting girls and women with opportunities to excel in these areas is not only an important issue of equity, but it bolsters the pool of available STEM-skilled workers,” said Melissa Price, minister for Science and Technology.

The government highlighted that only 20% of girls reported being interested in STEM before 2018, but today upwards of 68% are interested in a STEM career.

One of its initiatives is producing a STEM Equity Monitor, which is published annually from 2020 to track system-level change to provide a consistent source of evidence.

For example, it found that in 2020, women’s participation in STEM occupations decreased to 13% from 14% in 2019. Previously this had increased by 3 percentage points between 2009 to 2019.

For comparison, women have comprised almost 50% of people in non-STEM occupations since 2009.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has made “little tangible progress” in delivering Project Gigabit and is unlikely to hit the 85% coverage target by the 2025 deadline.

This is according to a new report by the House of Commons’ Committee of Public Accounts, which counts Dame Meg Hillier MP and Shaun Bailey MP as its members.

DCMS is accused of relying too heavily on commercial suppliers, as well as providing little to no information on the baselines used to achieve the repeatedly-revised 2025 target.

Although the national gigabit coverage increased from 40% to 57% between May and October 2021, DCMS has been unable to provide the Committee with information on “why this has occurred”.

The 17% jump in coverage in five months has been attributed to Virgin Media O2’s cable network upgrade that was completed in December 2021.

Despite Virgin Media O2’s upgrade providing gigabit availability, with average download speeds of 1,130Mbps, the report notes that “this is not achieved through full fibre technology, which is more future proof but requires new infrastructure”.

“While companies such as Virgin Media O2 have set out their intention to further future proof their networks over time, once the current upgrade of existing cables has been completed there will remain a gap in coverage if the Department does not put in place further contracts to build the gigabit infrastructure,” the committee found.

DCMS’ assertion of delivering the 85% target by 2025 was found unconvincing by the committee’s members, who have recommended that the department “determine the most appropriate metrics and frequency for reporting progress with the scheme” by March 2022.

The committee also warned that the gigabit rollout could potentially perpetuate digital inequality, with many rural areas in the UK being left behind in the deployment. It has asked DCMS to provide information on how it’s planning to overcome barriers to nationwide deployment as well as ensure that even the most remote communities will have access to gigabit connectivity.

“The Department should write to us setting out how it will reach the remaining 15% left out of the 2025 target, as well as the very hardest to reach 0.3%,” the report stated.

DCMS was not immediately available to comment on the recommendations.

The UK government has unveiled nine new Institutes of Technology to provide skills training for understaffed industries, including STEM and healthcare, in an effort to tackle regional skills gaps and level up local economies.

First announced in 2017, the institutes aim to close the UK’s skills gap by unifying businesses and educators to help teach people the skills that are desperately in demand, such as advanced manufacturing, digital and cyber security, aerospace, and healthcare.

Offering an alternative to studying a traditional three-year degree, the courses last between six weeks to a year, allowing students to space out their studies and learn at a pace that works for them.

The nine new Institutes of Technology are to be based in Blackpool, Cheshire, Chichester, Sheffield, Stoke on Trent, Southampton, Derby, Salford, and South Essex, the Department for Education announced today.

Scheduled to open in September 2022, the nine new institutes join the existing 12 that were opened in 2019, bringing the total to 21 institutes across the country.

The Department for Education also confirmed that students studying courses including T Levels will benefit from an extra £615 million investment in the 2022-23 financial year, allowing students to access an additional 40 hours of education to help them catch up on lost learning due to the pandemic.

Commenting on the news, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi said that the nine new Institutes of Technology “will boost access to more high-quality and flexible education and training – giving people the chance to learn at a pace that is right for them, while ensuring we have the skilled workforce needed to boost our economy”.

“Ensuring everyone is given the opportunity to reach their full potential, no matter their age or life stage, is a vital part of our mission to level up this country,” he added.

The new institutes are part of the Autumn 2021 Budget that pledged an additional £1.6 billion to be invested in education for ages between 16 and 19, and training by 2024-25, compared with 2021-22 financial year.

Earlier this week, the Cabinet Office unveiled its approach to “protecting and promoting” the country’s interests in the cyber space as part of the £2.6 billion National Cyber Strategy which called for businesses to "play their part" in expanding talent pools in order to improve diversity across teams.

Homeless people, and others below the digital divide, in Cornwall, are to be lent laptops and tablets by the local council.

It's part of an initiative from Cornwall Council and the homeless charity St Petrocs to prevent people from being "left behind" as more services become digitised, according to a BBC report.

Council cabinet member, Richard Pears, said the authority was keen to work with more partners on the scheme, adding that any organisation was eligible to apply. As well as lending devices, St Petrocs would provide training to people it was supporting, according to the council.

"A lot of our clients don't have access to IT," said Melissa Winstanley, St Petrocs vocational development administrator. "They want to be able to enhance their skills, which going forward will help them find suitable courses and progress into suitable work."

Access to digital services for work, education, and even simple life administration has become increasingly difficult for certain parts of the UK's population that cannot afford hardware or broadband. This has been exacerbated by the pandemic with more of these services moving online.

Cornwall Council said about 13% of its residents, and those in the Isles of Scilly had never used the internet, and a quarter of adults lacked basic digital skills, as of 2019. The council said its digital inclusion team had trained six St Petrocs staff to help with the technology and with around 70 devices currently available.

"As training, healthcare, and other services are increasingly going online, it's vital they are not left behind," the council said.

The issue of adult access to the internet has been repeatedly pointed out to the UK's government, with the Good Things Foundation calling for more support in January. Helen Milner, the chief executive of the social change charity, told IT Pro that the government had "not invested a single pound to adults below the digital divide".

"The government has done quite a lot around the child part of the digital divide," Milner said. "But for adults, the government have not invested a single extra pound on adult digital inclusion, be that around devices, or be that around skills."

Despite one billion people, or roughly 15% of the global population, living with a disability, there remains much work to be done by governments and businesses to close the digital access divide that exists today.

This digital divide has become even more prominent with the emergence of COVID-19, with differently-abled people, like everyone, suddenly forced to grapple with the challenges of social distancing and lockdowns. Technology eased this strain for many of us, but research by South Korean academics found the surge in mid-pandemic internet usage wasn’t mirrored by people with disabilities. Differently-abled people were also less likely to be aware of, utilise or perceive the usefulness, of digital services.

Although there was no need for direct personal contact in accessing many public services, such as information on COVID-19 cases and the location of testing clinics, people with disabilities still faced barriers due to a lack of digital literacy and access. With the divide feeling wider than ever, innovators are increasingly looking to artificial intelligence (AI) to narrow the gap.

Digital barriers

From studying to accessing services and communicating, recent technological advancements have transformed every aspect of day-to-day life. People with disabilities, however, still face challenges in accessing the systems that have become more integral to our way of life. Even before COVID-19, differently-abled people used the internet, and other digital systems, at a level that was much below the standards people without disabilities have come to expect.

People with visual impairments, for example, use screen readers, applications that provide computer-synthesised speech output, to access web content. Their screen readers, however, find it problematic to convert text-to-speech if designers haven’t included appropriate alt-text tags on graphics, forms, tables, or links.

People with motor impairments, too, who had zero or limited use of their fingers or hands face considerable barriers due to cluttered layouts on websites, buttons or links that are too small. They also face difficulties using a pointing device, like a computer mouse. Finally, people with cognitive impairments like autism, dementia, or traumatic brain injury face significant trouble in understanding the design, layout, and navigability of websites that aren’t accessible.

Wielding AI for good

The use of AI – comprising mixed reality, speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and automation – has become more common in homes and offices, Soumendra Mohanty, chief strategy officer and chief innovation officer with Tredence, tells IT Pro.

“Today, if a patient calls a clinic, they get the opportunity to interact with virtual doctors and not just human doctors,” he says. “While a virtual doctor may not replace an actual human doctor, it could give a patient the confidence that they were able to interact with an entity whose body language was similar to a real human doctor.

“People with visual disabilities can take the help of advances in AI relating to gesture/touch or voice-enabled products and services. On the other hand, people with hearing disabilities can use gesture-enabled interventions using AR/VR apps. Finally, people with speech-related disabilities can use gesture/touch interventions in AR/VR apps.”

People with visual impairments, indeed, face severe accessibility challenges and, at times, are faced with the hard decision of giving up on their educational aspirations altogether, adds Mousumi Kapoor, the founder and CEO of Continual Engine, an accessibility systems provider. “The use of computer vision, NLP, machine learning, and AI can make complex documents and images readily accessible to people suffering from visual impairments,” she says.

“Earlier on, developers and designers needed to manually make image content accessible by physically authoring meaningful alt text (alternate text) for images. With the help of software products powered by AI, however, this process is automated, saving up to 60% of the time in comparison to doing the same processes manually. Besides enabling people with visual disabilities to get access to content that was earlier inaccessible to them, the use of such technologies helps in making content accessible to all.”

Building bridges with technology

One of the biggest differences AI-powered tech can make for people with disabilities is allowing them to form meaningful relationships with other people on a similar disability spectrum. When it comes to online dating, Michele Abraham, founder and CEO of Quiver Dating, tells IT Pro, people with disabilities are at a disadvantage.

“Most, if not all, popular dating apps do not cater to people with visible and invisible disabilities,” she says. “That is one area where AI in conjunction with AR virtual dating platforms can truly make forming meaningful relationships that much easier for people with disabilities.”

Online dating, however, is just one of many kinds of platforms using AI to improve access for people with disabilities. There are several others that fall into this bracket, including Moment.AI, a startup that’s striving to develop an in-vehicle AI system that can detect, monitor and analyse whether a driver is fit to continue driving. The firm aims to create image-based and video-based datasets using simulators to allow AI systems to pre-empt stress-induced medical events, such as strokes and seizures, before they lead to accidents.

Perhaps a little more widely known, Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk in 2016, aims to use a brain implant to allow humans to interface wirelessly with computers and mobile phones. The fully-implantable chips intends to help people with paralysis, as well as neurological disorders and disabilities in the future.

Finally, ObjectiveEd’s Braille AI Tutor, developed in conjunction with Microsoft, is a teaching aid for students who suffer from visual disabilities. This product uses gamification to help children learn through speech recognition with the help of a braille display.

Whether AI-powered tech will meaningfully improve conditions for people living with disabilities, is one that hinges on how robust and accessible the technology becomes. Thanks to recent developments, however, the future certainly appears brighter than it ever has.

The UK's workforce is getting older, and, for employers, that means greater access to a wealth of experienced employees. The ONS' latest Living Longer report, for example, reveals the proportion of UK workers over 50 is rising, many of who are less inclined to retire. Businesses, however, might risk losing these valuable members of the workforce by forcing them to use digital tools that are rushed out, inaccessible, and potentially bamboozling.

The value of an ageing workforce is clear, with nearly eight in ten (76%) employers suggesting older workers' experience is "crucial to the success of the organisation", according to research by YouGov and the Centre for Ageing Better. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), meanwhile, calculates that age-diverse workforces will boost GDP per capita by almost 19% over the next three decades. Anecdotally, too, employers say older workers have adapted particularly well to the home-working shift triggered by COVID-19. They do fear, however, that these gains may be compromised by the rush to roll out hybrid working technologies that have been designed with anyone but the end-user in mind.

"We had ten years of digital transformation thrown at us in 90 days at the start of the pandemic," director of talent and transformation at Advanced, Nick Gallimore, tells IT Pro. "That overwhelmed a lot of us, and it's fair to say there were generational differences in that."

Not all older workers are technophobes, of course. Plenty of IT professionals who grew up with Andy Pandy on TV are now using their decades of insight to spot crucial patterns in cyber security, detect AI biases that younger staff may miss, and help train their colleagues. There's also a significant cohort of over-50s who, unlike Generation Z, are somewhat alienated by phones that double as smart communications hubs, and who struggle with the plethora of devices and software required for modern working.

Don't forget about UX when rolling out new tools

Experience and people skills are vital resources, argues Freeform Dynamics analyst Tony Lock, who began his coding career in the early 1980s. Lock cites retail and education as two major sectors in which older workers have much to offer, and are willing to use digital tools that help them do their jobs better, especially amid social distancing measures. He warns that developers and vendors, however, are often rushing out these tools to the detriment of the overall user experience (UX).

"The tech that people have been offered, particularly for teachers in the rush to teach from home, hasn't been properly tested with users," he says, adding that ease-of-use is often overlooked. "Half the vendor briefings I go on say we've updated our user interface (UI) to make it friendlier and easier to use, but very few do that in-depth research to find out what would make it better for the people who use it." COVID-19 compounded the rush, but usability oversights are nothing new, he continues. "Years ago, Microsoft started claiming their technology was so 'foolproof' that you didn't need to train people to use it. Total nonsense. It's still total nonsense."

If companies fail to invest in accessible digital tools, they won't get the best out of their age-diverse teams, cautions Gallimore. "Level of tech-savvy is absolutely a factor," he says. "When things don't work the way you want them to, especially when you're working from home, that really impacts on people's productivity."

Keeping things simple should be your number one goal

The different strands that comprise workplace tech have become increasingly messy and difficult to manage amid the shift to home-working. Suddenly, organisations are expecting their workers to juggle different digital tools for booking, communication, payments, scheduling, and more. This hasn't just made things difficult for less tech-confident workers – it's also bad for security.

"Organisations that get technology right will get much more benefit from a diverse workforce, which includes a range of ages," says Sarah Henry of Oracle's HR transformation team. "But, instead, they wrap around all these security layers, like you've got to use a VPN then you've got to do a two-factor and make it all really complicated. It just turns people off. Particularly the older generation, who may say I don't understand why I'm doing all this."

Users who struggle with security layers have less time and energy to get on with their jobs, and they can make mistakes, which leave your business vulnerable to attacks. So while it may seem counterintuitive, stripping away layers of security may actually make companies safer.

Gallimore suggests, instead, using a unified authentication solution, much like a password manager. "You can't have this situation where, if you don't understand a particular one of multiple steps, you can't get into the system. Get as much of your employee-facing infrastructure as possible in the cloud, so you can then unify authentication. That would be a huge accessibility boost."

Lock, meanwhile, wants to see virtual workspaces that give workers a customisable dashboard with only the apps they need to do their jobs, while the company controls security and software centrally, and sorts out IT problems remotely. "If your employee does then mess something up on the machine, you just reload it from the centre again," says Lock. "You don't have to send Tony out in his non-eco car to drive 70 miles to fix it."

Some workplace tech vendors have launched products that get close to this unified, easy-to-use ideal. Salesforce's Work.com, for example, platform prioritises health and wellness for employees alongside training, scheduling, and integration with apps such as Slack. Oracle's new HR platform Journeys too, controls security remotely and intelligently, for example by setting different automatic levels of access in different locations. Workday's workspaces, finally, are more aimed at enterprise management, but the platform offers 24/7 support and unified resources that less tech-confident employees will welcome.

We have to be careful not to assume all older workers simply need more tech hand-holding than younger workers. Most certainly don't. The majority of experts, however, agree that if you want an age-diverse workforce, with all the benefits it brings, you have to provide them with digital interfaces that help them perform their jobs, rather than oversaturating them with devices and software that get in the way.

“Buy them only if you’re prepared to lose all your money,” said Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey in May 2021. He was talking about cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and one reason for his scepticism is that these next-generation virtual tokens “don’t have intrinsic value”.

But does that make them a bad investment? Indeed, are traditional currencies any better? Sterling was previously underpinned by gold, but Britain sold off half of its reserves between 1999 and 2002, when gold was at its lowest value in 20 years. When governments can make unilateral actions like that, decentralised cryptocurrencies which aren’t controlled by any single entity start to look appealing.

That’s particularly true if they’re set up to mimic a traditional gold-backed means of exchange, and Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto mimicked gold by making the currency rare and difficult to mine. To “create” a new bitcoin, a computer’s resources have to be used to crunch through equations. Most of those equations will come to nothing; just occasionally you will hit the jackpot and find a coin.

“It is its very cost of production that gives Bitcoin value (among other factors),” wrote Dominic Frisby in MoneyWeek last October. “You can’t just conjure up Bitcoins. You have to do some hard computer work first and thereby make your contribution to the network. And even if you do this, there is no guarantee you’ll get bitcoins at the end of it. There is risk.”

So, there’s a chance you could burn a considerable amount of electricity for no financial gain. That’s just one of the risks involved in mining cryptocurrency, and a big factor in the question of whether it’s worthwhile.

The biggest cost of mining: energy­

Mining bitcoins consumes a lot of electricity. In evidence presented to the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in 2018, Princeton University’s Arvind Narayanan outlined how Bitcoin miners were at the time computing “about 50 billion billion hashes… every second.” Combined, Narayanan estimated, those operations were consuming just under 1% of the global electricity supply, “or slightly more than the electricity consumption of the state of Ohio or that of the state of New York”.

And as time goes on it takes more and more power to generate a return. By 2020, digital assets exchange Zipmex was warning that “it takes a large setup nearly 30 days to mine 1 bitcoin. After deducting the electricity cost and the overall hardware and software cost, you will be left with 0.1 BTC of profit every month at best. With the majority of setups and the electricity cost and some manpower, it would cost you a total of $73,000 to process one Bitcoin every month.”

At the time of writing, a single Bitcoin is worth $34,471, so you’d have to bank on the value going up considerably to make any profit at all. Or, you could try mining somewhere where electricity is cheaper. In 2018, Elite Fixtures calculated the energy cost of mining a single Bitcoin across 115 different countries, and found prices ranging from from $1,190 in Trinidad and Tobago to $26,170 in South Korea. In the UK, the cost was $8,402. Unfortunately, it’s not feasible for most of us to up sticks and start mining in a different country: the costs of moving will eat significantly into any putative profits.

​Generating money through mining

It’s not just the energy of cryptomining that costs money: you need to pay for the hardware too. In theory you could use your personal PC, but this is likely to yield a trickle of currency at best, and most serious operations have switched to Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) designs that are custom-designed for mining.

One mining platform that uses this technology is the Antminer S19 Pro, which costs £6,500 and which can rip through 110 terahashes per second. On average this should generate approximately 0.0007 BTC per day – but with an energy consumption of around 3.25kW it’ll cost you around $18.72 per day to mine around the clock. At current rates, you can expect an operating profit of $4.25 (£3.05) per day, or $1,551 (£1,116) annually.

Clearly this setup isn’t going to make you a millionaire. It would take nearly six years just to pay off the cost of the hardware – and there’s a further complication too. The complexity of the Bitcoin mining algorithm is continually updated to compensate for technological advances in the mining hardware, to ensure that future computers can’t flood the market with cheaply generated coins.

This means that today’s state-of-the-art hardware can quickly become uneconomical. In 2018 the International Business Times reported that miners in China were selling off older mining hardware because it was no longer possible to mine enough currencies with these machines to cover their electricity costs: “a mining machine bought at a price of about 20,000 yuan ($2,885) a year ago is being sold for a price between 100 yuan to 1,600 yuan.” So if you want to keep on mining coins at a consistent rate, you need to keep investing in the latest hardware.

If you’d rather not be constantly upgrading your mining rig, an alternative is to mine in the cloud using sites like shamining.com, hashing24.com or genesis-mining.com. This lets you benefit from the expertise of dedicated teams for whom operating and refining a mining operation is a full-time job, and in many cases, you can also make responsible choices regarding energy consumption. Shamining has a focus on solar and wind energy, for example, while Genesis Mining is based in Iceland, a country where 80% of power comes from renewable sources.

Cloud mining is still an expense, though, with most services requiring an up-front payment. When choosing one, check the minimum required investment, minimum contract length, expected profit, and the terms on which you can withdraw your share of the operation’s earnings.

Can you still create Bitcoins?

If you really want to use your own computer for mining, there are sites that can help. nicehash.com is one that makes it easy, with a mining model which has (a little bizarrely) also been adopted in the latest release of ­­­the Norton 360 antivirus suite.

The idea in both cases is simple. The software runs quietly in the background, using your computer’s spare capacity to mine for cryptocurrency – in Norton’s case, Ethereum. Whatever you earn is automatically transferred into your wallet.

It sounds like a no-brainer: you might only see a small profit, but since there’s no impact on your computer usage it’s free money – right? Well, perhaps not. If you use your computer’s CPU, it’s all but certain that you’ll burn up a far greater cost in electricity than you will ever make back.

Graphics cards with their abundant cores and parallel processing are far better tuned to mining. If you have a powerful graphics card that spends most of its day sitting idle then it may be worth your while putting it to work. However, for precisely this reason, these cards are hard to come by, with mining enthusiasts snapping up stocks of high-end GPUs, leading to worldwide shortages of graphics hardware. To manage demand, Nvidia has even started shipping cards that deliberately reduce their own performance when used for mining cryptocurrencies.

Is cryptocurrency ethical?

It’s clear that, however you generate your cryptocurrency, it’s going to involve guzzling large amounts of energy, which can't be good for the environment. Cambridge university’s Bitcoin Electricity Consumption index recently put Bitcoin’s global electricity consumption roughly on par with that of a medium-sized European country such as Sweden or Ukraine.

Many have concluded that this alone is a good reason to ban all cryptocurrencies. “Bitcoin could be the first inefficient version of a disruptive technology,” Dr Larisa Yarovaya, a lecturer at Southampton university told the FT recently. “It should die for the common good of the planet and be replaced by a new model. It consumes more electricity than a country. All the rest is detail.”

And the societal cost of cryptocurrency mining isn’t felt only in electricity consumption. The GPUs and memory used in mining rigs are a hefty cocktail of silicon, copper, boron, cobalt, tungsten and all manner of chemicals. Some of those raw materials are in short supply, which is in part to blame for the current global CPU shortage. Rare-earth materials are – in part – being used up to mine highly volatile virtual currencies.

There is, at least, some awareness of these issues within the cryptocurrency industry. The Crypto Climate Accord, founded earlier this year, describes itself as “a private sector-led initiative for the entire crypto community focused on decarbonising the cryptocurrency industry in record time”.

The Accord – which is backed by some big names from the crypto industry – is largely focused on making mining use 100% renewable energy, with a target date of 2030. That’s more aggressive than many climate targets, but given that much of the mining is undertaken by unofficial farms around the globe, it’s highly unlikely to clean up the entire practice.

And even if it does manage to move generation to solar, wind and other renewable electricity sources within nine years, the question remains: wouldn’t that energy still be better used to power something more beneficial?

Alternative ways to profit from cryptocurrencies

You don’t need to create coins yourself to take part in the crypto boom. The price of all cryptocurrencies is in constant flux, and as with any other currency you can invest by buying low and selling high. According to CryptoCoin News, a 2021 study by investment firm AJ Bell found that “more Brits have bought into cryptocurrency than into equity … 7% of young adults have invested into crypto over the course of the last year. The FCA estimates that 2.3 million Brits now own cryptocurrency, which amounts to 3.4% of the UK’s population.”

If you’re not among them, you might be wondering whether you’ve left it too late. We can’t advise on whether you should buy into cryptocurrency: nobody can say what will happen to the market day-to-day, let alone over the longer term, so those of us who didn’t invest in 2010 can only look back and rue what we missed. However, since fewer than one in 25 Brits has yet invested in a digital currency, the market could still see gains as interest increases.

If you do decide to invest, there are a few important factors to consider, not least of which is the environmental impact. Make sure you trust whichever institution you use to buy your currency, and consider buying when the market is down, to maximise your chances of selling at a profit later. Finally, remember where we came in, with advice from the Bank of England: there are no guarantees in the world of cryptocurrencies, so “buy them only if you’re prepared to lose all your money”.

Digital literacy is becoming as important as reading and writing for young people’s future life prospects, a new report from Vodafone has found.

Limited access to an internet-connected device, or a lack of skills to use one, is preventing those entering the job market from attending online lessons or exams, applying for jobs, and gaining the necessary digital skills for many of today’s roles.

Almost a third (29%) of respondents polled by Vodafone and WPI Strategy said that they had to share a laptop, tablet or PC for work, education or leisure in the past year, with families having to choose which child gets to attend an online class. This number was higher among those aged between 18 and 24, with one in two (50%) being forced to share a device, resulting in limited access to education or work prospects.

In the last year, it's not only education and working that has shifted online. With the UK government aiming to digitise many of its services, those with limited access to a device or digital skills are finding it increasingly difficult to renew their passport or driving licence, or to view National Insurance contributions and HMRC correspondence. Vodafone’s report found that 19% respondents don’t have access to essential online public services, with a quarter (25%) saying they only had access some of the time.

The disparity was especially evident when comparing socio-economic groups: 68% of those in the lowest socio-economic group said they had access to essential services, while those in the most privileged had the highest rate of access at 89%.

Commenting on the findings, Vodafone UK CEO Ahmed Essam said that “the consequences of living without connectivity or the skills needed to access digital services are huge”.

“Digital literacy is essential to the life chances of everyone in the UK. Access to technology, connectivity and the digital skills needed for many of today’s jobs is critical,” he said, adding that Vodafone is calling on “the Government, businesses, charity partners and civil society to work together to create a blueprint to address the digital divide once and for all”.

Julian Knight MP, chair of the DCMS Select Committee and Chair of the APPG for New and Advanced Technologies, said that he welcomes Vodafone’s report “for opening up the discussion on improving digital skills and access”.

“It is now clearer than ever that digital skills and the ability to be connected is a vital part of our day-to-day lives. The pandemic has shown how all of us rely on the online world to stay connected as school children had their lessons online, parts of the workforce worked remotely and we used the internet to stay connected to loved ones,” he added.

This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode ‘How laptop libraries can boost digital skills’. To listen to the full episode, click here.

Jane McCallion

Hi, I'm Jane McCallion.

Adam Shepherd

And I'm Adam Shepherd.

Jane

And you're listening to the IT Pro Podcast where once again, we're talking about the digital divide.

Adam

A lack of access to technology can be a big problem, particularly for young people. If kids can't use a PC for things like schoolwork and job applications, they can end up being severely disadvantaged. That's why London based charity CC Foundation launched a laptop library programme allowing kids to borrow devices when they need them.

Jane

This initiative is supported by London MSP Totality Services. And we're joined today by Totality's co-founder Luis Navarro to discuss the UK's digital divide and how companies can help address the issue. Luis, welcome to the show.

Luis Navarro

Thank you very much for having me.

Adam

So to kick off with, can you tell us a little bit about your work with CC Foundation?

Luis

Yeah, sure. So I mean, just to get started the CC Foundation, there's a lot more than just the laptop library. That's one facet of many things that they do. So the CC Foundation was created by Fekky. Fekky is a very well known rapper. So he's a collaborator of many famous musicians, other rappers as well. And his kind of goal with the CC Foundation is to help underprivileged kids in East London to begin with. So it's in Lewisham. He basically wants them, he wants to help them get ahead in life. So there's the, there's the laptop library. There's things in there like a music recording studio, a podcast recording studio, there's kind of mentors they've hired for mindfulness. So it's very broad in terms of what they do. So, so I was contacted by Fekky a few months ago. And he was telling me all about the foundation, all the good work that they're doing. And he actually mentioned a survey that took place a number of months ago, too. So it was a survey of 13,000 London based kids. And the key findings were kind of quite striking. So it basically showed that 84% of kids in London do not have a laptop or access to a laptop, and over 50% of the kids do not have access to internet. So given kind of our background as Totality Services and where we've come from as a business, it all kind of ties in very nicely. So we're quite a young MSP. So we officially started in 2008. In terms of the real growth, it's only happened in the last four years. Our first hires were really young people, okay, so, apprentices, you know, 16 to 18 years old. So it's those young, hungry apprentices that really got us off the ground and got us going, okay. And that's something that we still do now, we still hire lots of apprentices. We invest lots of money in apprentices, in traineeships, getting them up to speed, a lot of these kids don't really have IT skills. So you know, they've got great customer service skills, and we teach them the IT side of things. So that's one thing. And then as a business, we've always helped charities in quite a limited way. So we do lots of donations, we support a few charities free of charge. The CC Foundation, and when Fekky got in touch, and he gave me the results of that survey. It's right, what else can we really do to help kids in London, especially those who are underprivileged? So the laptop library is the first thing so we want to make sure kids in London have access to a laptop. So it's predicted that laptops that we've donated are going to be accessed by around 1000 kids over the summer, okay. That's going to be fantastic. So, in terms of kids catching up with schoolwork after what's happened this year, with the pandemic, and last year, that's going to be a fantastic opportunity to help kids get up to speed. For us, the donation of the laptops is probably the most simple thing that we can do. Okay, it costs us money. What I want to do and what Fekky and I were discussing is, how can we really add value to these kids. Because any company can can donate laptops, what we want to do is actually help these kids get ahead in life, too. So the laptops are the first stage that's been put in place, that was launched a couple of weeks ago. We have around 30 staff members, you know, really highly qualified engineers. So these engineers can actually go and sit down with these kids. And they can say, look, this is, I can teach you about IT security. I can teach about social media security, what to post, what not to post, give them those base rules. Things like apprentices as well. So we want to make sure you know, if these kids are interested, they can come into our office and actually see what the office environment is like; some of these kids would never have been in an office. So we want to give them the opportunity. And it's not just an IT helpdesk perspective. You know, we have staff members who work in marketing and strategy and finance. So it could be they take an interest in one of those areas. And we're more than happy to help from that aspect.

Jane

It sounds a bit from what you've just said, that it's, it's not just a question of access to the tools they need, you know, to laptops, although that's clearly, obviously an important first step. But digital literacy seems to be part of the, the problem, if you like, as well, is that, is that a fair assessment?

Luis

Correct. So and that's where our staff members can really help. So we're putting in a programme, sort of putting a programme in place, which is having our staff go in and actually spend time with the kids, whether it's group sessions, and show them look, this is a laptop, you know, there's Mac, there's Windows, there's also showing them the basic applications. So things like Word, you know, this is how you write a CV, helping kids get that first step onto the career ladder, you know, we can show them how to draft a CV. So it's gonna be very involved. And like I said, the easy thing is just to do a one off donation, we want to have an ongoing relationship, and really help these kids progress.

Adam

Yeah, I mean, it's that whole kind of give a man a fish, give a man a fishing rod question, you know, giving kids laptops and saying yeah, there's a laptop, off you go, go and, you know, develop IT skills is one thing; unless you give them the the background, and the foundational skills of why you would want to develop IT skills, you know, opening their eyes to some of the possibilities. And the, this is probably gonna sound a bit trite, but the joys of IT and the things you can do with it.

Jane

This isn't a podcast for joy about IT. This is a podcast for problems in IT!

Adam

So speaking of which we've spoken a bit about access to technology, and you know, some of the problems in that area - as someone who's worked directly, you know, with this issue, and with people who are kind of in the middle of it, what's the scale of the problem from your perspective?

Luis

Sure. So I think the scale of the problem is really... it's huge, especially in certain pockets of London and other pockets of the UK, obviously. So I think a lot of these kids, they're really lacking a role model. They're lacking the resources, they haven't really had the opportunity. I think that's the key thing, is to give these kids a chance. You know, I've got so much experience, lots of people in my business have got lots of experience. And we've got some fantastic case studies, there's a guy who works for us, Shane, I mean, he started with us four or five years ago, as a 16 year old, you know, very basic salary. You know, fast forward a couple of years. He's our most senior project engineer. He's only 22 years old. So what I mean, a part of this project for me is giving these kids exposure to people like Shane who can explain their journey and say, look, I started with very few GCSEs. I didn't go to college, I didn't go to university. But look, do you know what? Totality took me under their wing. They showed me the ropes. And now I've really progressed. And you know, he's, he's, he's such a happy kid. He wants to learn, he's hungry. And it's those kids that we really want to take from the CC Foundation. You know, like I said, show them our office, show them all the different facets of our business, and help them grow and be part of that journey with them.

Jane

I think that's really important, you know, kind of showing people who are from disadvantaged backgrounds that , you know, this is for you as well. You don't have to be somebody who has, you know, nine A-stars or - I'm showing my age because I think that, you know, this isn't how they're graded anymore - but you know, kind of whatever high flying GCSEs, that actually, you know, there are other ways in and this is for you as well.

Luis

Correct. I mean, even with myself, so I went to university, I was never an academic, I never really had any real interest in academia, I kind of just followed the path. You know, everyone says, Oh, you need to go do your A Levels and you go to university. I just did it because it's what everyone did. I'm not an academic, I would be much better off, you know, finishing school at 16. And going straight into work. And, you know, there's lots of kids like that. But there's lots of kids like that, who just don't have the chance because of their background.

Adam

And there's lots of kids, I would imagine, who don't even really know that that's an option. You know, I think a lot of people when you say kind of like apprenticeships, they think, you know, plumber, or maybe at a push, electrician. They, they don't think of, for want of a better word, kind of white collar jobs like IT. You know, they don't see that as a possible route. And in fact, we were talking on a recent episode, we were talking to Sam O'Rourke, who founded his own company when his apprenticeship fell through, but he was saying the same thing. You know, apprenticeships, particularly for IT, in his view, are a better route into the industry than a traditional kind of university degree.

Luis

Yes. So that, that really resonates with, with me, I think a lot of our staff members as well. IT, I mean, it's a very, very specific skill set. Once you learn an operating system or a software, you know that I mean, you can study about IT generally. But in terms of the day to day work, as an IT engineer, you're generally going to focus in on one specific area, network, servers, etc. You don't need a degree to work in IT, it's actually you know, if you're interested in tech, and you want to kind of, you know, if you're a hungry individual, and you want to get ahead, then it's a very kind of, I would say, not, not easy, but it's, it's some, it's quite a simple path to get into career-wise.

Adam

And I would actually argue that doing an IT based degree or a technology based degree, may even be counterproductive, because a degree course will last what, three, four years, look at the rate of change that we've currently got in the industry. If you are just graduating now, this year, then you look at, you know, where the industry was three, four years ago, there's a good chance, you may not even have been focusing on things like, you know, cloud technologies, and Azure and whatnot, you may still have been working with kind of more traditional databases and, and stuff like that. Kubernetes probably isn't going to factor in at all. Whereas if you're doing an apprenticeship or any kind of on the job learning, you can adapt and respond to these really rapid industry changes, as they happen, rather than, you know, learning this whole set of skills, and then effectively getting into the workplace and having to chuck a third of it in the bin, because nobody's using it anymore.

Jane

Amusingly, that's the opposite of what I was about to say.

Adam

Really?

Jane

Yeah, because a lot of computing, or computing type academic programmes, especially at ex-polys, involve a third year in industry. So you have got that little bit and it's not unknown for people who have done a placement with the company, if they've done well, to be asked to come on board straight away and maybe actually abandon the final year of their degree.

Adam

Oh, absolutely. But surely, by that logic, just cut out the middleman and go straight to the placement year.

Jane

I think it probably depends on the kind of person that you are.

Adam

True.

Luis

One thing to factor in as well is kind of the soft skills that you do gain at university. So yes, there are things that you can gain as an individual, which will help and make you more mature. When you go into the workplace, you know, things like doing a presentation in front of, you know, PhD lecturers and 500 people in your lecture hall, you will never get that at a secondary school. So I do think, you know, you shouldn't kind of just forget University, but like you said, I think the rate of change in IT is massive. And every time we've hired kind of a more senior engineer who has been to university, we would always start them at the same point, as if we were hiring an apprentice anyway, because, you know, we have a certain way of working, we have certain systems we use for documentation or our help desk platform. Most of our engineers are entry level, regardless of if they've got a degree or not, they will start as a first level engineer, and they'll have to work their way up. So we don't kind of judge on whether they've got a degree or not, we judge more on the person and that's where with us, age is not a factor. And that's, again, ties back to the CC Foundation. We want to bring these kids in, we want to help them.

Jane

So Luis, I have to ask, were you surprised to be contacted by Fekky in the first place?

Luis

Um, so I was really surprised and I'll tell you why I'm surprised; because I think IT support companies, MSPs generally, are kind of unsung heroes. I think through the pandemic, we've done a great job; we're never really mentioned, we're never in the spotlight. I was actually really happy I was contacted because we never usually get contacted like any, for anything like this because we're so under the radar. You know, you never go to a party and talk about oh, you know, I've got a fantastic MSP; it's never mentioned. The fact this guy, you know - who I then checked out on Instagram, he's got over 100,000 followers - had got in touch with us, I thought was pretty amazing. And like everything he said resonated with me 100%, you know, based on, you know, how we started the company. You know, hiring the young staff members, we help charities already; it was the perfect fusion.

Adam

Yeah, I think that's a really good point about MSPs and channel companies in general being really I think underappreciated in the industry. You know, MSPs, in, in a lot of ways are like toilet cleaners. They're doing their job if you never think about them. You don't notice them.

Luis

What an analogy, I've got to use that one again.

Jane

I bet you're flattered.

Luis

Yeah, 100%, I'll put the marigolds on, just give me a minute.

Adam

But yeah, it's an, it's an absolutely essential service that you never notice or think about until it's not there.

Luis

Yeah, correct. So like, with us in the pandemic, so we've got over 140 clients, we support over 3000 staff members, across the capital, we had to transition all those, all those users from working in office environments to working from home pretty much overnight, you know, it's, that was huge. And now we're having to do the, kind of the reverse. We weren't paidany extra, it's all kind of within our, within our fees our clients pay us. And that was a huge task. And most clients that appreciate it, but mainly just thinking, well, that's just the service, there's a lot of effort that goes into, you know, a huge transition like that.

Jane

Yeah.

Adam

So speaking of which, has the pandemic, you know, going back to what we were talking about, about, you know, access to technology and the digital divide and whatnot. How has the pandemic impacted kids from these disadvantaged backgrounds? We've mentioned the access to kind of learning and education, which is something we've written about on the site in the past, what, what impact does this whole shift have on them if they don't have access to these kind of tools?

Luis

So I mean, from an education point of view, it's quite simple, kids, a lot of kids missed out on a lot of school. So without access to that technology, they really couldn't keep up. And in schools nowadays everything is pretty much online. If you go to a school as a kid, Well, look, you'll get, there's a laptop that you can use. So obviously, transitioning to home where a lot of these kids won't have Wi-Fi, won't have internet, or they don't have a device. So they just end up, you know, watching Netflix all day, or, or what have you. So I think that's a, it was a real issue. And that's where with the CC Foundation, we can now really help and help them catch up.

Adam

Because, of course, the you know, it's one thing, being able to do homework and, you know, access information, and whatnot. But another really key aspect of it was the contact with educators and with teachers, you know, if all of the classes and all of the interaction is happening over, you know, video conferencing platforms, and you can't access that as a student, it means you end up missing out on a huge amount of contact time, which is absolutely key, you know, if you're missing 18 months worth of contact and support, essentially, from your teachers, they're going to have a really hard time identifying any kind of problems with your education and supporting you through those.

Luis

Yeah, I think also, you know, in terms of certain specific scenarios, you know, imagine a single mom through the pandemic, who doesn't have great financial resources. And a kid at home who can't study, doesn't have a laptop, he can't, you know, he's not interacting with his friends. I mean, there must have been some really, really difficult scenarios throughout the pandemic. So, that, that for me, it's, it's heartbreaking. And it's things like that, that, you know, if we can help in any little way, then we're going to do that. And that's again, you know, with the CC Foundation, this is a fantastic relationship. And it's, I think it's one that we're gonna definitely be investing in for the years to come.

Jane

It seems to me almost like there's a reflection between what you spoke about in `regard to your clients, and what happened to all the kids who were sent home suddenly that if this happened to one or even two people at a time, it would be manageable. If you had one client who was like, do you know what, we've decided offices are the thing of the past, can you help us move completely remotely - in normal times I imagine that would have been pretty easy to deal with. But because it happened to everyone, hundreds, thousands of people all in one go, yeah, that made it slightly more tricky.

Luis

Correct. I mean, from a client point of view, luckily, we're quite proactive as an MSP. So cloud first strategy, we had been kind of beating that drum with our clients for a number of, for a number of years. One, so my, my fellow co founder, Pedro, he, he works from Iceland. He's been working from Iceland for four or five years. So he kind of, so he's always been saying, Look, guys, you can work from home, you can work remotely. With our team, we've always said look, you can work from anywhere. If you want to work from Australia, do that. Obviously log on on time, finish on time, do your job properly, it doesn't matter. So we've always been kind of ahead ahead of the curve when it comes to those things. And with our clients, we've always tried to do the same. And obviously, there's some sectors where you do need, you do need physical kit in the office, you do servers, NAS devices, etc. But where it's possible, especially in lots of service based industries, financial institutions, etc, you can be cloud first very easily. And we always kind of push them to adopt that strategy.

Adam

So you've been running this programme in collaboration with CC Foundation for a few months now. Correct?

Luis

Correct. Absolutely. Yeah.

Adam

What impact has it had on the, on the kids so far?

Luis

So all the feedback we've had so far, has been really, really positive. So I know, the kids are kind of, there's kind of different levels of kind of expertise. So there's been a few sessions now where kids have actually learned, you know, how to even how to switch the laptop on, you know, how to type. So it's really kind of basic level.

Adam

Really?

Luis

Yeah, absolutely.

Adam

I'm surprised that the inherent level of you know, to use a slightly overexposed term, digital nativeness, or digital nativity, I guess.

Jane

[Retching noises] That's, that's my feelings on the matter.

Adam

OK, so Jane's not a fan. But I'm surprised that the level of digital familiarity isn't kind of just inherently higher, you know, given these people, these kind of, these kids have grown up around technology.

Luis

So they have, I mean, look, it's interesting. So some of the kids, you give them the phone, and they can type really quickly. But you give them a laptop, and it's literally, you know, finger finger, you know, searching around, the full stop, you know, where is everything, all that kind of stuff, it's more that kind of level. And then so, you know, kids who are a little bit older, they're a bit more familiar. And it's more a case of, you know, showing them those skills, you know, using Word, using Excel, it's a very simple formula. Yeah, and it's opening their eyes to, you know, for in our eyes, probably quite simple things. But for them, you know, it's kind of it's a new world for them. And we're so happy we can be part of that journey.

Adam

Mmm, it's a, it's an interesting idea, because I sort of get that cause if you put a typewriter in front of me, for example, I suspect I would struggle quite significantly, with with kind of some of the, the fairly basic mechanical processes, you know, I can, I can type I'd like to think pretty well, yeah. But taking that kind of almost that step back compared to what I'm used to, to use a slightly older technology, I think would really tripp me up. So I can I can see how it would be the same for a generation who's grown up predominantly with, as you say, kind of phones and tablets rather than traditional laptops.

Luis

Absolutely. I've literally just changed my keyboard. So I used to have kind of a wired-in keyboard and I got a wireless one. And it's, so this keyboard's low profile. So I was used to typing a certain way. I didn't have to look on my keyboard. When you change keyboard - trust me, you need to start looking at the keys again, familiarising yourself with keys. I think it's really that kind of shift.

Adam

Yeah, absolutely.

Jane

I can tell you, Adam, if you started using a typewriter, you'd soon find out that the way that you actually hold your hands, presumably like this, and for the audience, who can't see how I'm holding my hands, it's quite flat...

Adam

I can't see how you're holding your hands.

Jane

Like this, quite flat, you'd need to do that. That's, which is like kind of far more upright in order to strike the keys hard enough. I can use a typewriter.

Luis

You're like Frankenstein doing that.

Adam

So Luis, aside from the fact that it's, you know, a good thing to do from a moral perspective, are there any other reasons why IT companies should consider getting involved with projects like this?

Luis

Well, I think from a pure selfish business point of view, there's lots of hidden gems out there. And I think most companies and IT companies included, we go down that traditional route of 'Okay, let's use LinkedIn to find staff. Let's use recruitment agencies'. By taking this different approach, you can get, you know, guys, kids who are so hungry, they want to develop, they want to learn, you know, you don't pay any recruitment charges. They're really willing to learn. They want to engage, they want to take things to that next level. And that's how we can help them.

Jane

Well, unfortunately, that's all we have time for this week. But thank you once again to Luis for joining us.

Adam

You can find links to all of the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes, and even more on our website, itpro.co.uk.

Jane

You can also follow us on Twitter where we're @ITPro, as well as Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Adam

Don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find podcasts and never miss an episode. And if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and a review. We'll be back next week with more analysis from the world of IT. But until then, Goodbye

Jane

Bye.

In the modern world, digital skills are absolutely essential, but if you don’t have access to technology, developing those skills is easier said than done. We’ve covered the UK’s growing digital divide in previous episodes, but this week, we’re looking at how one MSP is partnering with London-based charity CC Foundation to help close this gap by providing young people with access to digital devices, mentoring and apprenticeship opportunities.

This week, Totality Services co-founder Luis Navarro talks to us about his work with the charity, why he’s so passionate about the role of young people in the modern IT industry, and how organisations can help open the eyes of more kids to the possibilities of a career in tech.

Highlights

“I was contacted by Fekky a few months ago, and he was telling me all about the foundation, all the good work that they're doing. And he actually mentioned a survey that took place a number of months ago, too. It was a survey of 13,000 London based kids, and the key findings were quite striking. It basically showed that 84% of kids in London do not have a laptop or access to a laptop, and over 50% of the kids do not have access to internet. Given our background as Totality Services and where we've come from as a business, it all ties in very nicely.”

“There's a guy who works for us, Shane, I mean, he started with us four or five years ago as a 16-year-old, on a very basic salary. Fast forward a couple of years: he's our most senior project engineer. He's only 22 years old. A part of this project for me is giving these kids exposure to people like Shane, who can explain their journey and say, look, I started with very few GCSEs. I didn't go to college, I didn't go to university. But look, do you know what? Totality took me under their wing. They showed me the ropes. And now I've really progressed.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• Education is needed to end apprenticeship stigma, says BCS
• Microsoft's Apprenticeship Connector will help SMBs find digital apprentices
• Is a degree still necessary to get ahead in IT?
• UK digital divide is "narrowing" as a result of the pandemic
• TechUK urges government to level digital divide
• The IT Pro Podcast: Can 5G close the digital divide?
• Can private companies help solve the COVID laptop crisis?
• The IT Pro Podcast: The teenager who started a networking firm
• Lockdown Laptop Map lists close to 1,000 schools in need of tech supplies
• Charity sector hamstrung by lack of tech support
• UK gov "hasn't invested a single pound" to adults below the digital divide
• 17.1 million Brits lack essential digital skills for work
• UK gov's digital skills failure costing £6bn in lost GDP per year
• UK gov pledges post-pandemic digital skills boost
• UK's growing skills gap could stall COVID recovery
• Three-quarters of over-45s keen to invest in digital skills
• Out of office - on forever: Meet the companies leaving the office for good
• The IT Pro Podcast: There’s no such thing as obsolete tech

Subscribe

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This automatically-generated transcript is taken from the IT Pro Podcast episode 'Can 5G close the digital divide?’. To listen to the full episode, click here.

Adam Shepherd

Hi, I'm Adam Shepherd.

Jane McCallion

And I'm Jane McCallion.

Adam

And you're listening to the IT Pro Podcast where today we're talking about the digital divide.

Jane

Technology plays an essential role in most of our lives, from the jobs we do to the way we unwind. It's easy to feel like it's everywhere. But there are many people in the UK who are still without basic broadband access. This may seem like the definition of a first world problem, but it can have serious implications for people's livelihoods and well being.

Adam

This so called digital divide is a growing problem in this country and one that the government is under increasing pressure to address. Joining us today to talk about what this issue means for the UK, and how the government and the private sector can work together to tackle it is Cisco's UK CTO, Chintan Patel. Chintan, thanks for coming on.

Chintan Patel

Thank you for having me.

Jane

So regular listeners will know that this is something that comes up a lot in the show, and possibly partly because of me. But what is the state of the UK's connectivity at the moment?

Chintan

So I think one of the biggest things over the last 12 months has been the fact that connectivity has become something that's an essential for each and every one of us, I think, you know, it was a, it was something that we wanted and needed prior to the pandemic, but actually, the last 12-18 months has shown how critical it has been to, you know, whether it's accessing critical services, you know, keeping kids educated, accessing health care, or simply staying connected with friends and family and being entertained, you know, it's become such a core part of everything that we do, and when you know, our lives are more connected than ever before. And, you know, we've seen that this has been hugely important over the last year, and increasingly will be going forward as well. But as you said, in your opening, you know, we do have a digital divide in the UK, you know, that opportunity to connect isn't evenly distributed, even though, you know, I guess some of the figures we have through some of our research show that although there are high levels of connectivity available, the uptake of services perhaps isn't there currently, 96% of the UK population have access to connectivity in one way, shape, or form, but only 60% use the service. So is that because of affordability? Is that because of access to the types of speeds? Or the technology? Or is it due to skills or lack of skills perhaps. You know, we need to kind of go and have a deeper look at that in terms of how we help more people get connected, given you know, our lives are driven by digital technology more and more.

Jane

Yeah, I was gonna say presumably, you know, 96 people - 96 people; hopefully it's a bit more than that - 96% of people have access to connectivity. But there's a big difference between the connectivity that I get here in an urban area versus members of my family who live in more rural areas.

Chintan

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think this goes back to, you know, there are a lot of not spots, as it were within the UK. So we have, you know, dense metropolitan areas, which have really good broadband connectivity with very high speed. And you have lots of other places, which perhaps have connectivity, but not to the same extent. And, you know, actually that 96% number is quite interesting, because when you look at the 4%, that perhaps don't have connectivity, that actually equates to about 2.67 million people. So it's not an insignificant sum of people who don't have any access at all. And so, you know, I think there's this point around, you know, let's make sure we get as many people connected as possible. And then, you know, we've seen some of the targets the government's set out in terms of, you know, gigabit broadband to 85% of UK premises by 2025. You know, all of these are going to become so, so important as we go forward.

Adam

So, as we've previously discussed, in many cases, rural broadband is still lagging behind urban centres. But why is this still the case? You know, given the importance of internet connectivity, and, you know, the development of newer, you know, newer technologies, like fibre optics, and, you know, wider distribution methods for internet, why are rural areas still lagging behind?

Chintan

I think there's a, I mean, there's a number of, I guess, reasons, both economic, from an opportunity perspective, you know, the ability for service providers to reach communities where perhaps they don't have the volume of customers to justify in some cases the return on investment. There's also, I think, a technological issue in some cases where, you know, in places where you just haven't been able to pull fibre because it's physically impossible to do so. And we need to look at new technologies to help us do that. And, you know, 5G is a great example of that in terms of, you know, where we can't pull fibre can we use spectrum? And can we use it in efficient ways to, to deliver that. And we've we've been involved in some trials over the last few years, with the UK government to actually try and deliver some of these types of capabilities to rural areas. One of the projects was called 5G RuralFirst, which was exactly that, around delivering 5G connectivity to rural areas, and actually creating a testbed and a trial programme to show that, you know, you can get the economic return, you can drive up productivity of those rural economies, which are so vitally important to the UK. But also think about new use cases and things like agritech, in fishing, in different types of industries, where perhaps technology hasn't been used in the way that it has been in many other industries, and where, you know, kind of digitization has, has helped other industries grow or grow their kind of global access to other markets as well. So, you know, we've been, we've been very focused on trying to drive that. And we think if we, if we use technology and digital technology, like 5G, and others and Wi-Fi 6 and other technologies to kind of reduce that kind of digital divide, then, you know, we can get more people into the kind of digital economy going forward.

Jane

I have heard 5G be proposed previously as an answer to rural broadband issues, or just kind of broadband or connectivity issues, in general, you seem quite positive about it. But from my point of view, I can see a couple of real challenges to it. And I'd like to get your perspective on it. And the first is the way that 5G works, it can be thwarted by walls, which is a bit of a, or can be a bit of a problem. And also the sort of geography of the UK can make it difficult for you to get the signal in certain rural areas. If there's a lot of hills, once again, you've got a problem. Is it going to be that effective? And price is probably my third point, you know, 5G is not cheap, either, the price will obviously come down as it rolls out. But those to me would seem to be not insignificant obstacles to 5G really helping to close the digital divide.

Chintan

Yeah, I think they're all valid points. And I think this is why, you know, we've been having to do these trials to kind of prove out, one, the technology to overcome some of those physical barriers that exist, and just the laws of physics, which you can't generally get around, which we, you know, we have to, we have to take into account as it were. But also, you know, it's this view that actually, it isn't all just about 5G, it's about finding the right technology for the right use case, and actually meshing together different types of technology to deliver what you're trying to achieve, and what the outcomes specifically is for that particular use case, that industry, etc. And, you know, in some cases, you know, it might not be 5G directly all the way to you in a, in a, in a particular environment in a rural area - maybe it's a combination of things, right, maybe it's 5G backhaul, but it might be Wi-Fi, high speed Wi-Fi 6, you know, directly to you and it's actually these technologies working together. And they're fundamentally built off the same kind of core technology. So we think, actually, when you bring these together, you can get the economics, right, because I think, to your point, the economics have to be there, I think all things being said and done, I think, you know, we've got to make sure that it's affordable for the, you know, the consumer, if you like, of the service and the technology, but then also it's got to be economically viable for the provider of the service as well, and that there is a win-win on all those parties. And I think to your other point, that affordability is something that we do genuinely need to look at, you know, we do all want high speed and we want gigabit and we want, you know, all of those capabilities, but those do come at a price because they require an infrastructure investment from, you know, the providers of that technology. So I think it's both the service providers, you know, our role as the makers of the technology, and, you know, government, the society at large have to come together to think about well, what are the provisions we need to make to enable more people to access it, cause I mean, we know, you know, the benefits that this creates. You know, we've seen, I think the last, as I mentioned earlier, the last four months has really, really proven this out. But, you know, more than half of people now think, you know, investing in connectivity is as important as the other utilities, you know, water, electricity, gas, it's one of life's essentials, now.

Jane

Yeah.

Chintan

And you know, if you look at, you know, kind of the productivity for the UK economy as well. And you know, we've got a huge small business community across the UK, reliable fast connectivity is going to be really increasingly important for them as we come out of the pandemic as well to kind of continue to not only tap into the local markets, but more broader markets. And we're also seeing a bit of a shift, you know, as a result of the pandemic, in terms of connectivity influencing actually where we choose to live. And, you know, this, this whole remote work, hybrid work experiment, which I think will continue for, you know, as we go forward in hybrid work, as it were, but this idea that work is not a place you go, but it's something you do. And, you know, I've spoken to many of my peers in the industry, who are really looking at a talent pool that is not necessarily local anymore, but it is national. And so, if we have that high speed broadband connectivity to more people, then it will, it will also give people an opportunity to not have to be physically located where their company is based, as it were, but actually tap into that. So I think, you know, there's a knock on impact for local economies, and this kind of levelling up agenda that we've got across the UK to try and drive, you know, skills across UK jobs, opportunities and allow people, irrespective of wherever they are, to tap into different types of jobs and careers.

Adam

So Chintan, you mentioned infrastructure investment, just now. The UK's 5G infrastructure in particular, is still lagging, I think it's fair to say, a little bit behind other countries in terms of both speeds and coverage. does this indicate a potential barrier to this strategy?

Chintan

Well, I think we've got, we've done a lot, I think, over the last few years, but I think we do have to continue to invest in that, you know, we look around the world. And obviously, there are a number of countries around the world really accelerating on this front, I think the pandemic naturally slowed rollout down over the last year as service providers focused on kind of keeping essential services up and running. But you know, I do envisage that will, that has really started and will restart kind of the, the, the focus on that. So, you know, I'm optimistic that actually the investments that are going in, and the work that is going on will prove beneficial. But clearly, you know, we've got to, we've got to keep the push on this, because we know that, you know, the number of things that are being connected, for example, to the internet, over the next few years are going to require this level of connectivity going forward, we've seen different types of services, which are now completely reliant on digital connectivity, and things like 5G are going to be so critical to make that happen. I mean, even if you just look over the next couple of years, you know, more traffic will cross the UK, and in fact, the global internet, than did in the last 30 years of the internet. So you can just see the amount and volume of things from a traffic perspective, which is going to require higher bandwidth, because we are now using and getting accustomed to higher fidelity content, if you like, high definition video, high definition audio, and then more immersive experiences. But also, you know, we're going to see billions of more things connected over the next few years, you know, we're going to get to nearly 30 billion things connected to the global internet by 2030. And that's going to be a huge amount of pressure that's going to be put on to the infrastructure, both from a physical connectivity perspective, because we're connecting different types of things now, it's not just laptops, mobile devices, smart cameras, etc. You know, on average, we're going to have over the next few years, anywhere between five and ten connected things on us, as wearables take hold, sensors take hold into our daily lives in terms of everything that we're doing. So all of that's going to require a different kind of set of thinking. And this is why actually, just before actually the late end of 2019, we launched a whole programme of activity, which we've been calling the internet for the future, which is, what does the next generation internet really need to look like? What does the infrastructure need to look like? Because the economics, the technology, we've had to fundamentally rethink it because it, cause it is 30 years old, you know, when we designed the first generation internet. So we've been taking a ground up look at that, with technology all the way from the silicon in terms of how the brains of the infrastructure is rebuilt. So actually thinking about, you know, what scale that we need, looking at the optical infrastructure. So this is the pipes that connect, you know, the backbone of the internet. So, you know, with huge swathes of traffic traversing the world. And then the economics more importantly, that we touched on earlier, you know the price points that the infrastructure needs to grow, to enable that connectivity becomes more important as well. So that coupled with the innovation happening in 5G, and more importantly, the use cases, because, you know, we've seen there's a, there's been a step change in economic impact as a result of some of these transformational technologies. You know, 4G resulted in, I'd say, the smartphone revolution, which completely transformed that kind of mobile experience. And while while 4G transformed that consumer experience, we do fundamentally believe 5G and Wi-Fi 6, and the next iterations of Wi-Fi will transform business in terms of the business applications of it.

Adam

And I think it's also worth touching on, you know, when we, when we talk about the digital divide, it's not just about things like, you know, oh, can I stream, Netflix, can I, you know, do video calls in high definition, all that kind of stuff, more and more businesses, you know, for the last three, four or five years, have been investing really heavily in cloud services, in SaaS products to power the kind of the core of their business. And that means that if you are in a situation where your internet isn't, you know, high speed enough or reliable enough to access those services with a level of stability, that effectively makes you kind of almost unemployable for businesses whose technology stacks rely on cloud services. You know, for example, if you work in marketing, and you're doing a lot of collaborative work on things like Google Docs, or you need to be, you know, collaborating on client meetings and stuff, and you need to be regularly uploading and downloading files from SharePoint drives, or any kind of content storage medium, that's going to be really, really difficult, if you don't have a certain level of internet access.

Chintan

I couldn't agree more, you know, I think everyone should try and disconnect and try and see, like, you know, during the normal workday, not necessarily, you know, you obviously want to disconnect when you're on holiday, and we recommend that highly for everybody, right, but, you know, actually just trying to do a day's work in today's world, without having any form of connectivity would become near impossible for many people. That's not to say that's universal, because, you know, there are two thirds of jobs around the world are not office based, and, you know, perhaps don't require the same level of digital connectivity. But having said that, for a vast majority, especially in the UK, where we've got a very high services economy, and people who rely on these types of technologies, and that reliance on cloud services, which is, which is fully dependent on connectivity, becomes even more important. And, you know, we know, both that's a productivity impact for the UK, I think it's also, you know, it's the digital skills and the positive impact it will have on people's earnings, you know, all of those aspects, you know, we know that actually, through some of this research that we did, you know, half of those online claim they've used the internet to find employment. So it is one of the primary methods of actually finding a job now, you know, shopping online, we all know, right, you know, has become, you know, essential, we were seeing that shift from offline to online, previous to the pandemic, and it's really just accelerated that. So, you know, now if you need to buy anything, then you're typically looking online first. And so that's, that's essential.

Adam

I mean, even sectors like hospitality, which, you know, traditionally has been almost exclusively offline and you know, disconnected. Even if you go to a restaurant or a bar now, certainly during the pandemic, but it's looking like this is going to be a kind of continuing trend, you have to place your order via an app. So if you don't have internet access, you know, if the, if the venue doesn't offer free Wi-Fi and you don't have internet on your phone, then that business, that service is just completely cut off from you.

Chintan

Yes, exactly. And I think you know, those organisations that are going to be successful going forward are the ones that can blend that kind of physical and digital experience in the same way in a kind of easy and seamless manner. I, you know, I also think, you know, if you think that services point you raise is so important. I kind of use the example of, you know, GP appointments, you know, back in 2019 there were 214 million NHS appointments that happened in the UK, only one percent of those were over video. Fast forward, fast forward a year. And we all thought it wouldn't be done and everybody thought perhaps it would never be done. But it has been done. And we've proven we can do it. And actually, for many, it's the preferred way of doing it, the fact that I can now access my GP within a couple of hours if I need to, rather than waiting 10 days for an appointment, that has to be a good thing. Right, that's a, that's a good thing for all parties involved, to be fair, in terms of, you know, being able to see more patients and, you know, we've got a huge backlog, as we know, of patients that need to be seen by our medical staff, and how are we going to scale that? We're going to need to scale that using these types of technologies going forward. So yeah, that point around service, that point around access, I think becomes important. But also maybe a point which, which we kind of alluded to earlier, which was around, you know, maybe somebody not being able to go into somewhere and having access on or internet on their phone. But it's also those skills, and that digital literacy. There are many in society have grown up, you know, think of my parents who didn't have to, and didn't need to use some of the digital tech, you know, in, you know, a year ago, but now, I've had to become savvy, because some of the services, they need to access, the fact that if they did want to go to a restaurant, they need to use an app, to order food, etc, and make a payment means we're having to educate more people in terms of how we do this. So I think that's a, that's another big area that we're going to need to focus in on.

Jane

And obviously, this can't all be left down to the private sector. So how should the government be working together with the private sector to address the issue of the digital divide and problems with connectivity?

Chintan

Yeah, I think, you know, this is, this is a societal and collective issue, I think, for us to solve it is, it's everyone has a part to play. You know, we're very supportive of, you know, that kind of industry-government partnership, I think which, an academic partnership, which really makes a big difference in this so you know, our work in actually leading up one of the levelling up goals, which is focused on closing the digital divide, it's one of the goals that the government has set out and led by the Right Honourable Justine Greening, it's, it's a, it's a framework that's connected to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but it's really applied to kind of the levelling up challenges that we've got in the UK, there are 14 of them, you know, around equality and inclusion, having a strong foundation on infrastructure, opportunity, etc. So, you know, I think that's one of the ways, it's not the only way that we can do but you know, investing in things like our Networking Academy, which is, you know, one of the world's largest global online training platforms. And investing in those skills has become really important as well. And, you know, we've got over 330 networking academies in the UK, having trained over half a million people. And we've just announced, kind of a global push on that to deliver access for all effectively and free training on essential IT skills for up to 20 million more people globally over the next five years. And we think, you know, actually pushing this into places which have access to a different demographic is going to be important. So you know, we need to push into places like libraries, we need to push into prisons, we need to push into the police force for cyber training, you know, we need to we need to kind of drive it into different areas of society.

Adam

So when looking at any public sector initiative, whether that's in partnership with the private sector or as a kind of standalone project, cost is frequently the biggest barrier. So when Labour proposed giving people free broadband access during the last election campaign, they were roundly derided for it. Who should foot the bill for infrastructure and connectivity expansion projects like this?

Chintan

Well, I think it's a, it's a, it's a broad subject, which I think, you know, merits some deep discussion by all parties, I think there's a, there's something that the government does need to do in terms of making sure there's uniform access available, that it's fair, that it's affordable. And equally, you know, for the providers of the technology to make sure, and providers of those services, that you know, we are collectively delivering the levels of speeds or levels of quality and affordability that will allow people to tap into it. So I think it's, it's a, it's a collective thing that we need to do. It's not to say that it's something that is a problem necessarily for the perhaps, you know, 60, 70% that have access, are using, and it's available to, I think we really need to look at the people who who don't perhaps have access, and also the people that have access, but aren't using it and trying to really get into the issues of why they're not using it, you know, is it genuinely because of affordability? Is it because of reliability, i.e. they can't trust the fact that it's always going to be available so that they can rely on it? Or is it because of skills and, you know, digital literacy, which, which has been the case in many, many, many areas, so, and then tackling it from that basis, I think would make it really viable. You know, from our perspective, I think, you know, we're very focused on trying to drive this and, you know, over the last, over the last several years, we've, we've invested, you know, huge sums in partnership with the UK Government to try and drive digitization projects across the UK. And we've had 20 projects, you know, around the UK, which have been around whether it's high speed Wi-Fi on trains, whether it's, you know, digital rural connectivity, smart cities, etc. And so, you know, we'll continue to invest in that. And I think, you know, it's the partnership between government, academia, the private sector and industry at large, which will, hopefully help to solve this.

Adam

So you mentioned reliability there. And I just wanted to touch on the UK government's universal service obligation, USO, which is currently set at 10 megabits per second. And that's the minimum level of speeds that UK broadband providers need to guarantee under law. Is this enough, do you think, based on the based on the stuff we've discussed already? You know, the increasing need for digital connectivity, both at home and for work? You know, those rules were drawn up a number of years ago now, before a large part of the massive cloud expansion that we've seen over the last couple of years. Do these, these service obligations need to be revised, do you think in light of these expansions?

Chintan

I think we have to continually look at those, we have to take an assessment in terms of, you know, where digital society is today versus where it was, you know, so many years ago, when those were drawn up. So, you know, if I look at, and you highlighted this, this very clearly in terms of how much, how many cloud based services that we're using, but it's, it's not even just the individual usage from, from a personal perspective, from a work perspective, you know, we look at our homes now. We have smart appliances, which are constantly going back and forth to the cloud to to get survey data or, you know, answer your questions. We've got smart cameras in our homes now that are helping keep us safe and secure. We have other sensors. So actually, the volume of traffic that is being driven now, and the high definition and high fidelity nature of that means those bandwidth requirements that we had before are fundamentally changing. And, you know, there is a definite need for higher broadband speeds, high bandwidth speeds. But more importantly, you know, greater reliability of those. We'll also see a bit of a shift in terms of those cloud services. You know, do you need to send everything back to the cloud? You know, does some of it actually could some of these things be done closer to the edge, and we're starting to see a little bit of that happening already in the kind of re-architecting of the internet infrastructure, where actually, we're not sending sending all of those workloads to be processed into a data centre, somewhere in the ether, as it were, you know, we are doing some of that closer to the edge for that responsiveness for that bandwidth optimization for delivering that kind of digital service. So we're seeing organisations, you know, really looking at re-architecting their, their environments to make that happen. So, yeah, look, I think, you know, given where we're going with, you know, advances in AR and VR technology, and other kind of more high bandwidth experiences, then that's going to become more important going forward.

Jane

So Chintan, where do you think things are going in this area over the next couple of years? Say, five years?

Chintan

So look, I think we're in for an exciting ride. You know, we're one of the internet's optimists and actually, I think, you know, technology is going to play such a fundamental role in everything that we do. You know, you just look at today, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, and everything in between, you know, we are digitally anchored to technology in one way, shape, or form, and hopefully, it's making hopefully, it's making our lives a little bit better and more efficient every day. And you know, that that's our goal. And I think if if technology can help us improve our lives, the way we live them, be connected, be safe, secure, in everything that we do then that can only be a good thing. And I think, you know, I often get asked what does the future look like? And I think the truth is, we don't really know. But you know, what we can do is we can we can pattern match from what's happened in the last few years and kind of look at where, where will technology end up. And you can see some of the innovations happening across the industry, whether it's in connectivity, whether it's in travel, whether it's in kind of the digital economy, and I think the UK is at a at a pivotal moment, we've got an amazing opportunity, both socially and kind of technologically to lead the world in a lot of these areas with some of the best academic research going on around the world. And really bringing the full economy and everybody along with us and not leaving anybody behind.

Adam

Well, while we could talk about this for another hour, I'm sure that's all we've got time for this week, I'm afraid. Thank you once again, Chintan for joining us.

Chintan

Thank you very much for having me.

Jane

You can find links to all of the topics we've spoken about today in the show notes and even more on our website, itpro.co.uk.

Adam

You can also follow us on Twitter at @ITPro as well as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Jane

Don't forget to subscribe to the IT Pro Podcast wherever you find podcasts and never miss an episode. And if you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and a review. We'll be back next week with more analysis from the world of IT. But until then, goodbye.

Adam

Bye.

From talking to our friends to getting through our daily workload, there’s very little in modern life that doesn’t depend on the internet in some capacity. But while that’s all very well for most of us, a significant number of people in the UK have little or no access to the internet, and this can be a major problem for issues like skills, employment and more.

This problem has not gone unnoticed, however, and efforts are underway to help close this element of the digital divide. One potential technology that could offer a solution is 5G, and in this week’s episode, we’re joined by Cisco’s UK CTO Chintan Patel to discuss how this new technology can be deployed to help address the issue, some of the potential pitfalls, and why government and the private sector need to work together to ensure that in the rush for digital transformation, no-one is left behind.

Highlights

“We've been having to do these trials to prove out the technology, to overcome some of those physical barriers that exist; there’s the laws of physics, which you can't generally get around. But also, it isn't all just about 5G - it's about finding the right technology for the right use case, and actually meshing together different types of technology to deliver what you're trying to achieve. In some cases, it might not be 5G directly all the way to a rural area - maybe it's a combination of things. Maybe it's 5G backhaul, but it might be high speed Wi-Fi 6 directly to you, and it's actually these technologies working together.”

“There's something that the government does need to do in terms of making sure there's uniform access available, that it's fair, that it's affordable. And equally, for the providers of the technology and providers of those services, to make sure that we’re collectively delivering the levels of speeds, or levels of quality and affordability, that will allow people to tap into it. So I think it's a collective thing that we need to do.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• A third of Brits say their broadband has worsened during lockdown
• UK digital divide is "narrowing" as a result of the pandemic
• TechUK urges government to level digital divide
• UK gov "hasn't invested a single pound" to adults below the digital divide
• 17.1 million Brits lack essential digital skills for work
• Microsoft warns of growing "digital divide" between state and private schools
• The IT Pro Podcast: The teenager who started a networking firm
• Can private companies help solve the COVID laptop crisis?
• Boris Johnson’s 2025 gigabit broadband vision in tatters, MPs claim
• Broadband Broadway brings full-fibre to Wales' 'forgotten village’
• A third of SMBs have never heard of gigabit broadband
• Broadband providers welcome Ofcom's new full-fibre rollout rules
• Gigabit broadband and 5G could jumpstart the UK economy, report claims
• Cisco gets ahead of the herd with ‘connected cow’ app
• 5G FWA could 'halve the cost' of rural full-fibre rollout
• 5G could provide £6.3 billion boost to UK manufacturing
• DCMS launches £30 million competition to diversify 5G supply chain
• Europe significantly behind in global 5G race, report claims
• Government's rural network infrastructure plans 'ignore businesses', claims Three
• UK gov proposes new 5G laws to tackle rural blindspots
• The IT Pro Podcast: Has COVID killed the smart city dream?

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Intel is working with Dell to expand its AI for Workforce Program to 18 additional institutions across 11 US states to help educate the next generation of US technologists, engineers, and inventors.

The programme, which began in 2020 as a collaboration with a community college in Arizona, will be available to a total of 800,000 students across these new schools. Students who complete the programme will receive a certificate or an associate degree in AI.

The chipmaker said that the programme helps students gain “critically-needed job skills” in the field of artificial intelligence. Students can choose to study courses on data collection, computer vision, AI model training, coding, and the societal impacts and ethics of AI.

The company is also collaborating with Dell, which will provide technical expertise to schools on how best to configure AI labs for teaching in-person, hybrid, and online students.

The programme will now expand from its pilot in Arizona, spreading to California, New Mexico, Nevada, New Jersey, Arizona, Wisconsin, Texas, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Michigan.

“The next-generation workforce will need skills and training in AI to develop solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, and community colleges play a huge role in unleashing innovative thinking,” said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. “Community college is where I developed my passion for technology and kicked off the career journey that eventually led to my dream job as the CEO of Intel.”

The company added that AI technology should be shaped by people offering “diverse voices and experiences”, and that community colleges offer the best chance to democratise AI technology, as these schools attract students with “the richest variety of backgrounds and expertise”.

Intel also stated that there are plans underway to expand the programme to 50 more community and vocational colleges in 2022.

Last month, Intel unveiled the latest family of Xeon workstation CPUs, comprising five 10nm chips and built on the Ice Lake architecture with up to 38 cores and support for up to 4TB memory. The company claimed the W-3300 family is designed for advanced professional applications like AI, architecture, engineering, construction, and media.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is re-examining winning applications in its program to provide internet access to rural Americans.

The FCC wrote to several winning bidders in its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) program yesterday to question them over the validity of their coverage. It wrote 197 letters to applicants for funding identifying areas it suspected already had broadband services.

Recipients of the letter included Starlink Services, owned by Elon Musk's SpaceX, which was among the biggest winners of the RDOF auction with an $885.5 million bid to provide internet access across 35 states. The FCC has raised questions about coverage in 34 of them.

The RDOF program is part of a $9.2 billion funding program to bridge the digital divide by offering broadband access across 49 US states. It allocated the funds via a reverse auction across 300 companies with 180 winners. The bids were to serve areas without broadband download speeds of at least 25Mbps and upload speeds of at least 3Mbps.

Winning bidders got the chance to divide their bids between different entities — such as subsidiaries working in specific states — which then filed long-form applications for the funding.

Yesterday, the FCC announced it was ready to provide $311 million to 48 broadband providers across 36 states. However, it needed more due diligence from some of its long-form applicants, it said.

"Concerns have nonetheless been raised that certain areas included in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund auction are already served by one or more service providers that offer 25/3 Mbps broadband service or otherwise raise significant concerns about wasteful spending, such as parking lots and international airports," the letter warned.

Recipients of these letters have until August 16 to reexamine their bids and weed out areas with adequate broadband access. They must then write to the FCC explaining why they are pulling those bids. The FCC will then announce all the areas where bidders pulled out.

The FCC released a list of bidders that have already defaulted on some bids, although this did not include all of the companies it wrote to this week. So far, the defaulted bids total $78.5 million.

The share of female enrolment in STEM courses increased to 46% in the UK 2020, according to online course provider Coursera.

The e-learning site's latest Global Skills Report (GSR) found that, in the UK, female STEM course enrolment surged in popularity in the first half of the year, jumping by 14% in six months.

The uptake was also noted globally, with the share of female enrollment in STEM courses increasing from 34% in 2018-19 to 42% in 2020.

The most popular STEM courses included computer science, programming, and machine learning (ML), the latter of which was found to be the most popular course in the UK in 2020, with a 72% skills proficiency. In the field of data science, UK users were found to have a 69% skills proficiency, while the nation's technology skills proficiency was found to be at 57%.

Nevertheless, the UK was found to lag behind in global and European rankings, placing 34th globally in data skills and 47th in technology skills. Earlier this week, it was also reported that the UK government's digital skills failure is costing £6bn in lost GDP per year.

According to Anthony Tattersall, EMEA VP at Coursera, "access to a variety of job-relevant credentials, including a path to entry-level digital jobs, will be key to reskilling at scale and accelerating economic recovery in the UK and beyond".

Tattersall also commented on the new partnership between Google and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), saying that "it's great to see the UK government taking early action by joining forces with Google to offer scholarships for digital upskilling on Coursera".

The Google Career Certificates courses, which launched on 26 May, cover a range of in-demand skills, from IT support and UX design, to project management and data analytics.

Based on the findings from the report, Coursera recommended that learners "invest in both soft and technical skills to stay job-relevant in a rapidly evolving labour market".

This could mean mixing problem-solving and organisational development with technical skills such as security engineering and computer networking, in order to score an entry-level job in cloud computing, or data analysis software with creativity and communication for entry-level marketing roles.

BT has announced plans to launch a new business unit tailored to the unique needs of the small and newly-formed businesses.

Named SoHo, which stands for "Single/Small Office, Home Office", the unit will aim to help the UK's SMBs and startups rebuild following the economically challenging pandemic.

BT's announcement follows a 16% increase in new tech startups last year, according to Companies House, which also recorded a 40% rise in new UK businesses. It estimates that there had been 800,000 new companies set up during the pandemic, many of them being digital shopkeepers and freelancers who work from home.

SoHo will aid home-based and single-site businesses with their digital and connectivity needs, according to BT, by offering a suite of services and apps including cyber security, free digital skills training, and new digital advertising tools.

The company also announced the launch of a new Wi-Fi package for micro-businesses, which will include full-fibre broadband with speeds of up to 900MHs as well as a Hybrid Connect device that switches to EE's 4G mobile network in the event of any connectivity issues with the fixed-line.

BT's managing director for Commercial and Marketing Chris Sims has been appointed the head of the new SoHo business unit, which he said was set up to invest "in the future of the UK's smallest firms and startups which are the lifeblood of the UK economy".

"Every big business starts small, and we want to help them thrive by delivering flawless connectivity, coverage and customer service - so that their broadband never lets them down," Sims said.

"Building on the purpose of our Skills for Tomorrow programme – which has delivered free digital skills training to almost 300,000 small business employees - we'll also be launching a suite of new services and apps to move the UK's smallest firms into the digital fast lane," he continued, adding that he's "really proud to be leading this new unit at a time when their success has never been more important in securing our country's future as we rebuild after the toughest economic crisis in a generation".

SoHo is to sit in BT's Enterprise division and will officially launch on 1 July 2021.

While the federal government is poised to spend billions expanding broadband service and helping bridge the digital divide, an FCC commissioner is pitching a different idea: Make Big Tech pay for it instead.

Brendan Carr, the senior Republican FCC commissioner, called for tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to help pay for federal efforts to connect more American households to broadband internet.

"It is time to fundamentally rethink how we fund our high-speed networks," Carr wrote in an op-ed published in Newsweek. "We should start requiring Big Tech to pay its fair share."

After the COVID-19 pandemic helped expose the depth of the digital divide in the US, policymakers in Washington, DC are pledging to bring broadband service to more remote regions and low-income households. The Biden administration is calling for $100 billion in spending to connect every American household to broadband internet by the end of the decade.

Meanwhile, Carr is arguing Congress should tax big tech to pay for it.

"Big Tech has been enjoying a free ride on our internet infrastructure while skipping out on the billions of dollars in costs needed to maintain and build that network," Carr said. He pointed to a study showing that online streaming by just five companies — Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, and Microsoft — account for a whopping 75% of all traffic on rural broadband networks.

"Yet Big Tech derives tremendous value from these high-speed networks," Carr added. "Indeed, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google generated nearly $1 trillion in revenues in 2020 alone — an almost 20 percent increase over the prior year."

Who mostly pays for that internet infrastructure? Carr points out that ordinary Americans pay for it, through taxes on their monthly phone bills. Those taxes go into the FCC's Universal Service Fund, which helps subsidize broadband expansion in rural areas.

It's outdated, Carr argues. "This is like taxing horseshoes to pay for highways."

Carr has no power to make any of these changes himself. He's one of five commissioners who oversee the FCC. Instead, he's calling on Congress to do it.

"Legislators could consider a range of potential revenue streams that have a sufficient nexus to the internet, including video streaming services like Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime; online advertising services like those offered by Google and Facebook; Apple's App Store and devices; content delivery networks and cloud services like AWS and online gaming services like Microsoft's Xbox," Carr suggests.

However, lobbying groups such as the Internet Alliance, which represents the world's largest internet companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, argue against "taxing the internet" to fund broadband.

Career advisors need to do more to educate people on the advantages of apprenticeships, according to the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.

Annette Allmark, head of Apprenticeships at BCS, said a social stigma is still associated with apprenticeship schemes, and that many still favour traditional university degrees, even if they are unsuitable for the student.

The comments follow recent findings from UCAS which show that only 4% of those surveyed associate the word 'prestigious' with an apprenticeship, in comparison to the 76% who aligned the term with a university degree.

This can be attributed to 'misplaced snobbery' and an 'outdated stigma' associated with such programmes, as well as a lack of accessible information about apprenticeships, according to UCAS chief executive Clare Marchant.

Allmark said that the results of UCAS' polls "shows more education is needed, especially from careers advisors – but also more widely via, for instance, social media campaigns to change perceptions".

"We know, as a professional body, that apprentices are skilled and competent. We carry out the final test that digital apprentices have to take to prove they can do their job – an end-point assessment," said Allmark.

"We have seen an ongoing increase in the numbers we process, which shows the popularity of this career path and progression onto degree apprenticeships. It's also a great choice for sectors of society which, traditionally, have seen the least participation in higher education," she added.

Allmark's statement follows another set of UCAS polls which found that Computer Science was the second most popular degree apprenticeship considered by students applying to study in 2022, chosen by 65.2%. This was only marginally less than the top degree apprenticeship choice, Engineering, at 65.6%.

However, the UCAS survey also found that one in two college students, and one in three school pupils, weren't informed about the option of pursuing an apprenticeship, in spite of a legal requirement placed on schools to do so. Introduced in 2018, the Baker clause requires schools to allow colleges, apprenticeship providers, and University Technical Colleges to talk to students about potential study routes.

Last year, a Computer Science university student told IT Pro that she was not made aware of degree apprenticeships before starting her undergraduate degree, finding out about the option only at the end of her studies from fellow interns at Goldman Sachs.

"The bank chose which courses would be the most important for them. I think that's a great option and it diminishes the class gap between people who cannot afford to go to university," she said.

This is not surprising, given that UCAS research also found that almost one in three parents and carers were unaware that it was possible for students to apply for a degree apprenticeship alongside an undergraduate application.

However, parents who had taken an apprenticeship themselves were twice as likely to encourage their child to follow in their footsteps, as opposed to pursuing a sole undergraduate degree.

Google has announced the launch of its online courses for UK job seekers in partnership with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

The Google Career Certificates courses cover a range of in-demand skills, from IT support and UX design, to project management and data analytics, which are open for enrolment starting today.

The Google Career Certificates courses usually take up to six months to complete, with some possible to finish within three to five weeks if done full-time. Recognised by industry experts and employers, including Google, the courses don't require any prior experience or a degree in the topic in order for someone to enrol.

Originally priced at around $39 per month, the courses will also be available to some job seekers for free with financial aid, thanks to the 9,500 scholarships offered by Camden Council and the DWP. Universal Credit claimants will also be able to access the courses for free using a referral from their Work Coach, while the Prince's Trust and the INCO Academy are set to provide another 1,500 scholarships aimed for young people from underrepresented and disadvantaged communities across the UK.

Ben Marson, director of Partnerships at The Prince's Trust said that the organisation's partnership with Google will contribute to its "efforts to close the digital skills gap, allowing The Trust to provide a pool of young, diverse talent for businesses across the UK".

"Young people have been disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, accounting for over 60% of the fall in employment, with young people who were already facing disadvantage and adversity being hit harder still," he added.

The Career Certificates were first introduced in the US in August 2020 as an alternative pathway to conventional education for budding tech workers constrained to their homes due to the pandemic. However, the courses could continue well after lockdown restrictions are lifted, with Google reopening enrolment for its flagship training and certification programme earlier this year.

The tech giant also expanded its employer consortium as part of wider efforts to boost digital skills, which include more than 130 businesses, such as Verizon, Deloitte, and SAP.

Commenting on the announcement, chancellor Rishi Sunak said that "nothing is more important than helping people get new jobs".

"That is the mission of our Work Coaches day in and day out, and I'm delighted they'll be working with Google to give people the digital skills they need to do exactly that," he added.

A McKinsey survey of over 20,000 European citizens revealed that 86% of Brits have used e-commerce or online services in the past six months.

The report suggests that this makes the UK the most digitally advanced country in Europe, ahead of France (82%) and Germany (65%), and only behind India (88%) and Brazil (97%) on a global scale.

Around seven million people in the UK have accessed new digital services since Christmas, mostly grocery and education services as a result of the pandemic, with McKinsey estimating a total of 43 million digital users in 2021.

Over the last six months, digital growth has remained the same, according to McKinsey, but it may drop once the pandemic is fully over. The report suggests that over nine million Brits are expected to return to physical stores as soon as they are safe to do so.

"With consumers having reached high levels of digital penetration in most regions and industries, the acceleration into digital channels now seems to have levelled off in both Europe and the United States," McKinsey said.

"As a result, even as total digital adoption remains above pre-pandemic levels, many industries and regions may see a modest negative net change in post-pandemic digital use relative to 2020."

Consumer expectations of the post-pandemic future suggest a strong return of physical channels, according to the report, with some expecting to fully return to pre-pandemic behaviour. The main sectors here include travel, banking, telco carriers and entertainment.

In the UK, 35-44 year-olds plan to use fewer digital services after the pandemic, citing "distrust" as a result of data handling. This was also apparent in questions around security, with 44% of the respondents suggested they didn't fully trust digital services.

Over 17 million people in the UK lack essential digital skills (EDS) for work, while less than a quarter (23%) of employees reported having received any digital skills training from their employer.

That's according to a new report released by FutureDotNow, a coalition of companies and civil society groups working in collaboration with the UK government to boost the nation’s digital skills.

The coalition, which counts BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, Dropbox, CompTIA, and BT among its members, defines EDS as accessing payslips, booking shifts and leave, avoiding social media disasters, basic password practice, using cloud storage, analysing data, synchronising information across multiple devices, as well as basic cyber security skills such as being able to identify suspicious emails.

All of these are not being addressed by the majority of UK organisations, the report has found. It also warns businesses of the risks presented by the lack of EDS among employees, such as slowing the adoption of digital processes, which negatively impacts business productivity and financial performance. This, in turn, leads to businesses being held back and the UK’s global competitiveness reduced.

FutureDotNow chief executive Liz Williams said that the report “reveals a hidden middle between digital exclusion and advanced digital skills which needs addressing urgently”.

“There’s a significant part of our workforce without the essential digital skills required for the new global digital world we’re competing in. Great businesses are underpowered like smartphones with a flat battery because their workforces lack these essential digital skills.

"FutureDotNow and its members, who are already seeing the power of working together to upskill their employees, will be able to help them take action. And our Playbook, launched today is a practical guide to identifying missing essential digital skills and how to go about upskilling employees,” she said.

According to techUK president Jacqueline de Rojas CBE, the pandemic has revealed “an increase in people wanting and needing to acquire essential digital skills”.

“This has created positive momentum in driving the UK’s digital adoption which we must maintain in order to address the growing mismatch in the demand and supply of digital skills in the UK. FutureDotNow’s initiative to encourage business leaders to share knowledge and skills is critical to ensure the country and our citizens are ready for what comes next,” she added.

The percentage of homes in the UK without internet access almost halved during the pandemic, falling from 11% in March 2020 to just 6% in March 2021, according to research from Ofcom.

The regulator's findings suggest more people with "previously limited digital skills" have embraced online shopping, digital banking and video calling during lockdown. Many have also been aided by younger family members acting as 'IT support'.

However, despite more people jumping online during the pandemic, the remaining 6% of the country have felt digital exclusion more acutely. There are still around 1.5 million homes without an internet connection, according to Ofcom, which has caused people to struggle to shop, work and learn during the pandemic.

The demographics that are most likely to be included in the 6% are those aged 65 and above and families on low or no income. Almost half of adults who remain offline said they find the internet too complicated, or it holds no interest for them. However, more than a third of people said a lack of access to equipment is a barrier.

While the research found that all school-aged children had online access at home, 4% relied solely on mobile internet access during the pandemic. Additionally, one in five did not have consistent access to a suitable device to do their remote learning, a figure that increases to a quarter for children from households classed as 'most financially vulnerable'.

"For many people, lockdown will leave a lasting legacy of improved online access and better digital understanding," said Yih-Choung Teh, Ofcom's strategy and research group director. "But for a significant minority of adults and children, it's only served to intensify the digital divide.

"We'll continue to work with the government and other partner organisations to promote digital literacy and ensure that people of all ages and backgrounds are empowered to share in the benefits of the internet."

AT&T will invest $2 billion over the next three years to help address the digital divide.

The initiative combines the company’s discounted broadband service offerings with community investment. It builds on the company’s $1 billion contributions over the last three years toward bringing broadband to underserved communities.

“We believe that broadband connectivity is essential for all Americans,” said CEO John Stankey. “Our broadband networks rose to the challenge of the pandemic in part due to policies that promoted private sector investment in multiple technologies and networks.”

The company also intends to expand affordable broadband through the federal government’s Emergency Broadband Benefit program. That program will expand broadband subsidies for low-income households during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are five elements of this AT&T initiative:

Education Offers: The company will continue to offer discounted wireless to more than 135,000 public and private K-12 schools, colleges, and universities.

Access from AT&T: This five-year-oldAT&T-funded program makes the internet more affordable for customers by providing qualifying households with wireline internet service at $10 or less per month. AT&T continues to waive data overages for these customers and is keeping the expanded eligibility to qualifying households and those participating in the National School Lunch Program and Head Start.

Emergency Broadband Benefit: Eligible customers can temporarily reduce their monthly broadband costs by taking advantage of the federal Emergency Broadband Benefit. This FCC program will allow more than 30 million households to receive an additional subsidy of up to $50 a month for broadband internet service. This will push the broadband’s monthly cost to as low as $0.

To be eligible for the EBB, households must qualify for the Lifeline program. This initiative targets low-income households and provides small discounts on telephone and broadband services. To qualify for Lifeline, a household’s income must be at or below 135% of federal poverty guidelines or participate in other federal assistance programs, such as Medicaid.

Digital learning platform: AT&T is working with WarnerMedia to develop a digital learning platform to deliver high-quality educational content.

Learning centers: The company is launching 20 AT&T Connected Learning Centers in 2021. They’ll be in traditionally underserved neighborhoods where residents face barriers to connectivity. The company will provide high-speed internet and Wi-Fi and will ensure the centers have resources for devices like laptops and tablets. The centers will have access to WarnerMedia content and access to virtual learning tools from collaborators like Khan Academy.

The massive infrastructure plan that President Joe Biden has put on the table includes $100 billion that would connect every American household to broadband internet by the end of the decade.

The broadband initiative is just one part of a sweeping $2 trillion plan to improve the nation’s infrastructure and shift to greener energy over the next eight years. Biden unveiled the plan Wednesday, kicking off what will likely be lengthy negotiations with Congress.

Biden’s $100 billion package for broadband aims for 100% broadband coverage throughout the US by the end of the 2020s.

The plan is to bring broadband service to places where it doesn’t exist, and to speed up internet connectivity in areas where it’s slow. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies to send workers home to work remotely via their household internet connections, some workers in rural areas with limited internet connectivity found it challenging to complete daily tasks. The same thing happened in schools, as many students’ families can’t afford quality internet connections.

“It is necessary for Americans to do their jobs, to participate equally in school learning, health care, and to stay connected,” a fact sheet for Biden’s infrastructure plan reads. “Yet, by one definition, more than 30 million Americans live in areas where there is no broadband infrastructure that provides minimally acceptable speeds.”

The administration’s plan prioritizes networks affiliated with local governments, nonprofits, and cooperatives. It also seeks to lower the cost of internet service over the long term.

“While the President recognizes that individual subsidies to cover internet costs may be needed in the short term, he believes continually providing subsidies to cover the cost of overpriced internet service is not the right long-term solution for consumers or taxpayers,” the fact sheet says.

Now that Democrats control Congress and the White House, they have big plans for broadband. Biden’s announcement comes only a few weeks after Congressional Democrats unveiled their own $94 billion proposal to make broadband more accessible and affordable nationwide.

It also comes weeks after Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion package designed to help US households hit by the pandemic. It included $7.1 billion in emergency connectivity funding for remote learning and cash injections for federal technology efforts.

That $7.1 billion includes money for schools and libraries to buy Wi-Fi hotspots, modems, routers, and connected devices for students to use while remote learning during the pandemic. This cash injection resulted from pressure from education advocates who petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for funding in January.

And in February, the FCC announced a federal program to subsidize broadband costs for low-income households during the pandemic.

The UK government has launched nearly 400 free qualifications as part of its Lifetime Skills Guarantee.

The qualifications, backed by £95 million in government funding, range from engineering and digital skills to social care, and are available to any adult who has not already achieved a qualification at Level 3 - equivalent to A-levels.

There are 31 digital qualifications on offer with a range of topics to choose from, including computer science, software deployment, systems infrastructure, cyber security practices, and coding practices.

Each category awards either a GCE A-Level, a GCE AS Level, an equivalent occupational qualification, or an “other general qualification”.

The Lifetime Skills Guarantee, announced by the PM in September 2020, is aiming to transform the skills system to allow people to “gain the skills they need to progress in work at any stage of their lives". It also aims to give employers access to a skilled workforce by training people for the skills gap that exists now and in the future.

Prime minister Boris Johnson said that the government’s focus, as lockdown slowly lifts, is on recovering from the pandemic and “building back better".

“The Lifetime Skills Guarantee is fundamental to that – with free courses giving adults the expertise they need to find new, better jobs,” he said. “My message is clear. At every stage of your life, we will help you get the skills you need to train, retrain, and get into jobs you want and our economy needs.”

The government claims that adults who take the free courses will have the potential to boost career prospects, wages, and help fill skill gaps while supporting the economy.

It added that in order to allow more unemployed people to take full advantage of these courses, “the government will pilot an extension to the length of time they can receive Universal Credit while undertaking work-focused study".

Those that are unemployed will be able to train full time for up to 12 weeks, or up to 16 weeks on a full time skills bootcamp in England, and still receive Universal Credit to support their living costs at the same time.

“This will allow access to more training options and provide a better chance of finding work, while continuing to receive the support they need,” stated the government.

Education Secretary Gavin Williamson called the launch of the qualifications a “pivotal moment” in the delivery of the Lifetime Skills Guarantee.

“This offer will help give millions of adults the chance to gain the skills they need to secure rewarding careers in key sectors of the economy including construction, healthcare and digital. With almost 400 to choose from, there is something there for everyone."

In April 2019, the government was devising an essential digital skills qualification that would lay the foundations for taking up basic digital skills. A functional skills qualification, which was to be available from 2021, would offer support for employment or further education.

Moreover, the number of pupils choosing to study computer studies at GCSE-level dropped between 2017 and 2018, which sparked fears of a skills shortage. Entries for computer science qualifications fell from 318,781 in 2017 to just 175,230.

Last month, the Learning and Work institute published a report that stated the number of students taking IT subjects at GCSE level had fallen by 40%, prompting fears that the UK's economic recovery from COVID could be under threat from a growing digital skills gap.

A full list of the qualifications on offer is available here.

Salesforce has announced a new online training programme that aims to improve young people’s business and IT skills.

Launched in partnership with free online learning tool Classof2020, the ‘6 Weeks of Salesforce’ programme covers a range of topics that are deemed in-demand, if not essential, for the contemporary job candidate.

Released over the course of six weeks, the training programme covers marketing, business, developer skills, admin, analytics, finance, career development, Salesforce CRM, as well as skills inherent to starting a career as a Salesforce consultant.

In addition, the training programme will include a six-week podcast series titled ‘A Day in the Life of’, where Salesforce professionals will provide insight into a typical day to demonstrate the skills they have developed and use in their careers. The first episode of the podcast series is now available to stream on the Classof2020 website.

Salesforce also announced plans to create 4.2 million new roles through its ecosystem, which it says will be available by 2024.

By providing young people with the necessary skills, Salesforce aims to close the UK’s digital divide which has been further worsened by the ongoing pandemic. With many students forced to learn from home, many cannot afford proper hardware or don’t have access to a stable internet connection.

Students who have graduated in the last 12 months have had a difficult time finding employment due to the strained financial situation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Many young people have had their contracts terminated, while companies including Sky, Virgin, and Vodafone reportedly cancelled internships and grad schemes, leaving recent graduates with limited opportunities for employment or work experience.

Earlier this year, the UK government was accused of failing to invest “a single pound" to adults below the digital divide. Helen Milner, chief executive of social change charity The Good Things Foundation, said that the focus of the digital divide has mainly been on children since going into a third lockdown, while deciding to snub those over the age of 18.

"The government has done quite a lot around the child part of the digital divide. But for adults, the government have not invested a single extra pound on adult digital inclusion, be that around devices, or be that around skills,” Milner told IT Pro.

The UK's economic recovery from COVID is under threat from a growing digital skills gap caused by a sharp decline in the number of young people taking up IT courses.

Since 2015, the number of students taking IT subjects at GCSE level has fallen by 40%, according to a report from the Learning and Work Institue, an independent research organisation.

The decline has largely been credited to the government's attempt to replace the ICT GCSE with the more challenging computer science GCSE. However, the report suggests that while computer science entries more than doubled since 2015, it hasn't made up for the numbers dropping out of ICT - the number of entries dropped from 147,000 in 2015 to just 88,000 in 2020.

The slump is in stark contrast to the increasing demand for digital skills, which has been accelerated by the pandemic. The research polled 1,004 HR decision-makers in the UK and around 60% said they believed reliance on advanced digital skills was going to increase over the next five years.

Additionally, the research also included input from 2,017 people aged 16-24 and 88% stated that digital skills would be essential for their careers.

Despite this, participation in A-Level and further education IT courses have also declined, according to the report. For context, young people aged between 16 and 24 accounted for three of every five jobs that were lost over the last 12 months.

The deficit between the demand for digital skills and the availability of skilled workers has been an issue for many years, but it is now at a point where it is holding UK businesses back, according to the report. An 'Employer Skills Survey' from the Department for Education found that businesses that faced a shortage of skilled staff were suffering from increased workloads for other employees (84%), difficulties in meeting customer service objectives (49%), increased operating costs (45%) and lost business to competitors (40%).

"Our research shows that demand for basic digital skills is already nearly universal, and demand for more advanced digital skills will continue to increase," said Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute

"Helping young people develop the digital skills that employers need will be vital both to driving our economic competitiveness and to ensuring young people can succeed in the labour market of the future."

Call it the digital divide, the lack of broadband internet in rural areas and low-income urban households. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the contrast between digital haves and have-nots has become a burning issue.

Now Congressional Democrats have unveiled a $94 billion proposal to make broadband more accessible and affordable nationwide. The proposal aims to invest billions into bringing broadband service to places where it doesn’t exist and speed up internet connectivity in areas where it’s slow.

The bill also aims to help families struggling to pay their home internet bills.

About 30 House and Senate Democrats have signed onto the bill, which is being spearheaded by Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). They hope to advance their bill, the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, as part of congressional action on infrastructure reform later this year.

The digital divide has been an issue for years, but the pandemic put the problem in the spotlight.

As companies sent workers home to work remotely via their household internet connections, some workers in rural areas with limited internet connectivity found it challenging to complete daily tasks.

The same rings true for schools, as many students’ families can’t afford quality internet connections. Klobuchar has repeatedly described hearing horror stories about students who must sit in parking lots at liquor stores and fast-food restaurants just to access the Web.

This new initiative comes a day after Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act, a $1.9 trillion package designed to help US households hit by the pandemic. It included $7.1 billion in emergency connectivity funding for remote learning and cash injections for federal technology efforts.

The $7.1 billion will include money for schools and libraries to buy Wi-Fi hotspots, modems, routers, and connected devices for students to use while remote learning during the pandemic. This cash injection resulted from pressure from education advocates who petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for funding in January.

Now that Democrats control Congress and the White House, they have big plans for broadband.

In February, the FCC announced a federal program to subsidize broadband costs for low-income households during the pandemic.

“From work to healthcare to education, this crisis has made it clear that without an internet connection, too many households are locked out of modern life,” said new FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel, a long-standing supporter of broadband assistance for students.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has filed a request with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to connect its Starlink satellite internet service to moving vehicles, including aircraft, ships, large trucks, and RVs.

Starlink is a satellite internet constellation consisting of thousands of small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). As of 2021, SpaceX has launched 1,035 Starlink satellites into space and plans to launch up to 60 more per Falcon 9 flight.

These tiny satellites, which are in beta phase, work in tandem with ground transceivers to deliver high-speed internet access to consumers worldwide.

SpaceX is now working on an antenna that will “expand the range of broadband capabilities available to moving vehicles throughout the United States and to moving vessels and aircraft worldwide,” said David Goldman, SpaceX's director of satellite policy.

Goldman continued: "The volume of traffic flowing over the world's networks has exploded. No longer are users willing to forego connectivity while on the move, whether driving a truck across the country, moving a freighter from Europe to a US port, or while on a domestic or international flight."

SpaceX has also requested the FCC issue it a “blanket license” to commence its operations. FCC's terms don’t require applicants to submit a precise or maximum number of deployed user terminals, which is why SpaceX didn’t pin down the number of mobile terminals it plans to build.

Musk tweeted that the new antennas won’t connect Tesla vehicles to Starlink, citing that the “terminal is much too big.”

“This is for aircraft, ships, large trucks & RVs,” posted Musk.

SpaceX hasn't revealed details on the mobile Starlink terminals’ design, but Goldman says the terminals would be “electrically identical” to existing terminals, and users can mount them conveniently on vehicles, vessels, and aircraft.

Starlink’s current consumer setup kits cost $499 and users will also pay a $99 monthly service fee. The data speeds vary from 50Mbps to 150Mbps, but Musk says the data speeds will double to 300Mbps by the end of 2021.

A cohort of Scottish pupils have demonstrated their code-breaking prowess by securing their semi-final place in a competition designed to tackle the lack of female representation within the industry.

The CyberFirst Girls Competition, run by the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), is a contest for girls between the ages of 12 and 13, competing in teams of four, who are willing to put their digital skills and codebreaking abilities to the test in a chance to be crowned the UK’s champions.

Pupils from nine Scottish schools have progressed to the semi-final, where they will take on rivals from across the country.

In order to coincide with the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (11 February), the NCSC highlighted the strong nationwide participation in this year’s edition of the contest.

“We’re pleased to say that thousands of girls came forward to compete in this year’s CyberFirst Girls Competition and we congratulate the top teams which now go forward into the semi-finals,” said NCSC deputy director for Cyber Growth, Chris Ensor.

“These girls have opened the door to what could one day be an exciting and rewarding career, where more female representation is undoubtedly needed,” he said, adding that the NCSC owes “a special thanks to teachers who encouraged pupils to take up this fun opportunity to engage with – and hopefully be inspired by – cyber security”.

The home nation and English regions semi-finals are scheduled to take place on 19 March 2021, followed by the Grand Final on 26 April.

The NCSC reported that 6,500 girls nationwide took place in this year’s qualifying round, which lasted for 10 days until 3 February, with teams from more than 600 schools. Each challenge aimed to test skills in cryptography, data analysis, and problem-solving.

Participants were given a series of short tests, some of which included decrypting encoded passages and analysing unusual comments on a message board for clues about their origin, as well as calculating how long would it take to crack a 12 character password.

Since its launch in 2017, over 37,000 girls have taken part in the CyberFirst Girls Competition. The contest aims to tackle the gender imbalance and underrepresentation in cyber security, an industry where it is estimated that only one in five workers are female.

The COVID-19 pandemic has served to shine a light on so many inequalities throughout our society – but when it comes to the growing chasm of a digital divide, could IT professionals be doing more to bridge it?

As the post-Christmas lockdown loomed, and parents or guardians readied themselves for home-schooling once more, it became clear just how many young people faced being left behind because they lacked either fixed or mobile broadband access or a suitable device to work on.

Teachers and education experts were once again exasperated at the government for not providing promised free laptops or tablets quickly enough. On January 12, it announced 300,000 further devices would be made available, taking the total offered to 1.3 million.

Mobile networks also promised to zero-rate certain educational websites to remove them from eating up the precious limited amounts of data some families had on their phone contracts while BT's "Lockdown Learning" support scheme saw BT Wi-Fi vouchers handed to schools and charity partners to pass on.

Organisations and volunteers rallied too, rushing to scoop up unused devices from the public and businesses – in 2019 the Royal Society of Chemistry estimated there were as many as 40 million unused gadgets in UK homes alone.

TechForUK even created a Lockdown Laptops Map showing close to 1,000 schools that needed donations of such technology. Stephen Way, one of its volunteers who is also a school governor and a computer professional, told the media: "I have talked to headteachers and know there is a gulf between the equipment being supplied by the Government and the needs of students in most schools.

"Getting devices to them is a big enabler so we hope to make that process easier while pushing for more broadband access."

"It is absolutely the role of business to fill the void"

Way’s sentiments – and proactive approach to resolving the issue – are shared by many in the business and IT fields. David Richards, who founded the campaign Laptops For Kids in October in his hometown of Sheffield, believes businesses and IT depts could and should do more. It has now given out more than 5,000 laptops in the city and is launching the scheme in Leeds and Newcastle.

Richards, CEO of software firm of WANdisco, which is headquartered in Sheffield and Silicon Valley, explains: "The UK government has deeply underestimated the severity of digital poverty in the UK and it is absolutely the role of business to fill the void. The shortage of laptops is a supply chain issue.

"While over a million children go without, thousands of businesses have a surplus of unused devices. Gathering dust in storerooms, they might be obsolete for the latest business purposes, but for a child in need they can make a huge difference to their education, during home learning and beyond.

“In the past, businesses claimed security concerns prevented them from donating used laptops, but our work with the WANdisco Data Academy at The Sheffield College has proved we can rapidly and securely erase devices, while offering on-hand training for students at the same time. There is no excuse for business to let equipment go to waste when it is so vitally needed."

Charity Business2Schools is another organisation doing similar work, and has 3,000 schools in the UK and Ireland registered for donations, with more than 20,000 tonnes of office equipment and furniture allocated. It’s also using its partnership with mapping software company Esri UK to make this as efficient as possible.

Lindsey Parslow, CEO of Business2Schools, highlights how passing such technology on is often cheaper than recycling it, saying: "Private technology companies should absolutely be thinking about schools when upgrading and recycling office equipment. It's nonsensical such an enormous amount still ends up in landfill.

"School replenishment of IT takes place every 10 years on average, yet businesses tend to recycle desktop computers and laptops every three to five years. Having updated IT equipment means kids aren't simply waiting for an old computer to load up, they can work faster and be more engaged in the classroom."

Is doing the right thing enough of an incentive?

With the Government allocating taxpayers money to fund its current scheme, could there be a better way to partner with businesses?

James O'Dowd, founder of the Patrick Morgan Foundation, which has a digital academy to help young people into work, suggests doing right by the community you exist in should be reason enough to help.

"To be successful in the future, all business leaders must define a social purpose that serves their local communities as well as creating a functioning CSR programme that employees can be a part of. It isn't difficult to have a significant impact irrespective of the size of your organisation or budget,” he says.

"Tech companies can better define their contribution to the communities in which they operate, keeping it in line with the interests and skills of their employees and their own business expertise,” he adds. “For example, providing access to devices for underprivileged youths or avenues into STEM jobs for students. Not only will they make a remarkable impact on their communities, but they will find themselves with a motivated workforce with a bigger goal away from their day-to-day tasks."

One company exemplifying O'Dowd's view is Bath-based full fibre broadband provider Truespeed, which gives free ultrafast broadband for life to schools passed by its network infrastructure. Currently 50 rural schools in the Bath and North East Somerset area are benefiting from this initiative, including Marksbury C of E Primary School.

Julie Player, head teacher at the school, told the media: "Before we went live with this service our broadband connectivity was so unreliable that we couldn't really rely on online learning resources. Now teachers can now make the most of cloud-based storage for lesson planning, as well as a whole host of valuable cloud-based teaching aids."

However, as the COVID pandemic rolls on and new solutions are needed, could tax incentives be one route?

Peter Ford, public sector industry principal at Pegasystems, believes this would be preferable to putting the onus on private companies.

"The cost overhead associated with the refurbishment and cleaning of data would be far too much for them to bear. A social responsibility tax would be a more viable approach,” he says.

"By introducing a new (very small) tax, levied on companies whose net profits exceed a predefined level, there will be money available to invest in charitable funding of IT across the IT education sector to help close the digital divide.

"This would not preclude companies voluntarily donating surplus kit of their own volition and, perhaps, the government may want to compensate this via some form of tax break to at least make it cost neutral."

Echoing O'Dowd's views, he adds: "Doing 'the right thing' should be incentive enough."