I think though that the internet should be thought of as like electrification in the 1950s, which is when my father's family in Staffordshire got electricity and also interestingly the village of Heasta here in Skye got electricity too, at around the same time, so my neighbour tells me. Amazing! My father and uncle told me that in the 1950s electricity use was initially free and they gave you lots of free kit so that you would use a lot of it. In the 1960s there were always electric fires on in the kitchen, toasting an old cat, Old Thomas, until his fur began to burn and smell. "Mother, I can smell that cat again. Shift him, will, you?" while a roaring gale came through under all doors with mats stuffed up against the bottom of them, in vain, and wind was screaming out of the cellar door which had two open windows below ground, on the north side. So things were engineered to create a justification for the new system. It seems that government wants people to want the internet nowadays and then to want more speed than they need. If we could sell internet useage to Mrs Weaver's guests in her tourist accommodation business then that would be great, but it just cannot be bought at all, not at any kind of economic price, in the form of DSL or FTTP, that people will pay, without spending hundreds of thousands of pounds. And there will come a point when a certain subclass of guests will start to expect internet connectivity, delivered over wireless LAN, even though that is stupid as there is good 3G and even some fast 4G. What I would like to do is resell 4G, but tourists could rack up a bill that we cannot monitor or recoup. I racked up a £50 bill on 3G network charges in one day when I went into hospital a few years ago because I watched a couple of movies over the internet.
