Chancellor of the Exchequer Archives

Wimbledon doesn’t appear to be starting online until 14.40hrs. The budget speech is online, the England v Australia 1 day cricket match is online, there is no World Cup football until 15.00hrs. So what eh?

So video streaming has hit another high. It is up 309% on the norm. The World Cup has seen a 171% increase so many more people are interested in the budget than in the world cup.

All the recent major political events have seen large spikes in internet traffic online. This goes back to Obama’s inauguration, the last budget speech under the Labour government and the day after Polling Day in the recent general election, which was in itself a local maximum, to use my A Level maths.

Fortunately for ISPs the Chancellor of the Exchequer and his cronies are a fairly static lot. In other words the only bit of moving is the occasional waving of an order paper (or whatever they call them in Parliament – “The Dandy” probably). This means that the bandwidth usage hasn’t gone up in proportion to the number of users online in the way that it does for the sport. Movement means change which means lots of bandwidth usage when it comes to video streaming.

Tomorrow is the biggie. The last England Group match and one that they have to win. It’s all there: passion, excitement, intrigue, dissent, highs, lows, vuvuzelas, tears and tattoos but no romance – the WAGS have stayed away.

Read all about it on trefor.net. Order, order! No hang on the budget speech has finished. Everyone has started doing some work again.

Being a well read individual I took note of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s pre budget report this week. Some of it, in particular the bit about raising the tax rate of those earning over £150k, doesn’t apply to me (yet).

Some of it was however relevant to our industry. He endorsed the findings of the Caio Report on Next Generation Broadband Access. These findings of course said that Government should leave this investment to the free market. I can’t help but wonder when the free market will be able to spend the money. There again I don’t want my taxes raising to pay for it either.

The other relevant bit was that the Digital Britain Report is going to play a significant role in underpinning Britain’s future economic activity. I don’t think I have commented on this report before. Lord Stephen Carter, the UK’s first ever Minister for Communications Technology and Broadcasting (they just mix up the names in the title so that each new minister gets to be the first one!), is running the show. The aim is to gear the UK for leadership in the world digital economy. It’s a massive task spread across a huge range of disciplines but we have to wish him well with the job.