The Nexus Gulf

One of the many prominent speakers slated to speak at the Digital Britain summit at London’s British Library is Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The objective of the summit is discussion on the future of communications in the country, covering a range of topics from media to mobile broadband, and particularly the value of broadband in combating the economic downturn.

Other speakers include the trade secretary Lord Mandelson, the culture secretary Andy Burnham, and the communications minister Stephen Carter (who is the prominent figure behind Digital Britain). It is being hoped that the summit will generate significantly more public interest than the previously released Digital Britain report, as it is expected to be attended by a large number of representatives from interested sectors like media, telecom and technology.

Lord Carter has said that the government wants to finalise its thinking in the next two months on issues like international competition and development of telecom infrastructure, and that the wealth of opinion from the most prominent thinkers in the digital field, will be a major input for future actions.

The government has unfortunately failed to break a deadlock with Ofcom on several of the spectrum allocation disputes, which is a big roadblock in the achievement of one of the important objectives of the Digital Britain report – a 2 Mb broadband connectivity in the whole of UK by 2012. The report is itself quite unsure, and notwithstanding all the hype, it is quite surprising that Lord Carter is speaking of finalizing thinking.