Even-more-digital Britain

One of the first things you learn from studying the history of technology is that it takes a long time for new technologies to replace old ones. When something new comes along, it spends some time intermingling with the old, being used in the same processes, fitting the existing ecosystem for sometimes generations before natural selection takes over. So, the arrival of high-speed Internet didn't destroy the postal service, but changed it. More home shopping means more parcels and packages, more e-mail means less letters, and so on. But here's another fascinating example of the interplay between old and new.

So Amazon is offering customers the chance to store their data on an external device, ship it via post, and Amazon will load it into S3.
[From Amazon’s New Service Goes Postal Over Slow Broadband]

How's that for convergence? The idea that is if you have a really big chunk of data, then you may not want to spend a week uploading it over your Internet connection (slowing down everything else) but will instead be happy to put it on a USB stick or something and then post it. I'm sure Amazon must have researched the niche and found it big enough, although I have to say that I'm not convinced. If you post something, you've no idea whether it will ever get to its destination. Unless, that is, you fork out for a courier or pay extra in some other way.

Down in the comments on this story is though, I think, a really good idea. One of the posters suggests building very high-speed links out to copy shops or places like that. Then the average home user can pay for a 20Mb/s link for watching BBC iPlayer, downloading unauthorised copyright material and e-mail. Every now and then when they need to upload the contents of a 32Gb/s USB flash drive, they could pop into somewhere and pay a couple of quid to get that data into the cloud while they potter off somewhere for a coffee.

It struck me that this could be a brilliant idea to improve Digital Britain. Why not build high-speed links to Post Offices -- I call the scheme FTTP (Fibre to the Posties) -- so that people can wander into a Post Office with a memory stick or something and get their data uploaded super quickly into the cloud for a quid or something. This would make an ideal element for the Digital Britain strategy: it's both a sop and a hidden subsidy to Post Offices, so the unions and older people will like it, and it sounds modern and dynamic. It would also be much cheaper than universal high-speed broadband but would allow the Minister for the Internet or Whatever to say that the government was committed to delivering super high-speed ultra-broadband into every community in the land (or something like that).

But it might also have an unexpected benefit: it is entirely possible that entreprenerurs will think of cool things to do with the FTTP links for the 99.99999% of the time that they aren't being used to send gigabits of customers' data into the cloud. Thus, we might accidentally get some new services that we wouldn't otherwise have thought of.