Horace Mitchell

Newbury

Parliamentary Adviser, Sir George Young Bt MP

One of the most significant applications of 'always on' and high performance is remote systems management, especially for individual users of PCs and for small firms. The IT industry seems blissfully unaware of the extent to which individuals and small firms suffer bad experiences in their use of IT and the extent to which this inhibits investment and enhancement. "I won't [change it now/add that new application/shift to broadband . . . ] - I had such a bad experience last time".

Always on broadband potentially enables such users to delegate all systems management to outside specialists; indeed to have their applications and data offsite under management, just as with their company websites today. Already we get increased confidence in our systems when the McAfee pop up reports "Your virus protection has just been updated" or "Yourn firewall has just been updated" with no intervention required from us as users.

Next generation broadband will enable this approach to be much more widely applied. So long as our Government puts together some kind of strategy for high performance broadband to be deployed across the UK. Please.