We are now only three years on from that time when HM Treasury could publish a major policy paper on UK sub-national economic growth and not make a single reference to the essential role of digital networking.

That extra-ordinary oversight will never happen again.   No-one, not even the most skeptical of economists locked in a darkened room deep in the bowels of HM Treasury, nor even those charged with regulating policy in the communications sector, will be able to ignore the growing mass of evidence to support the blindingly obvious truth; for economic growth across all sectors the surest and most effective policy is investment in digital ‘next generation’ access.

‘Countries with the highest public investment in the Internet are also those with the largest non-public Internet contribution to GPD.’

Who says?   The recent McKinsey report ‘Internet Matters’ was published just in time for the G8 meeting. Whether or not world leaders gathered for that meeting had been briefed in time to influence their positions is irrelevant.   The simple fact that the positive linkage between GDP performance and Internet maturity has been determined now means that there are fewer excuses remaining for those who would ignore or deny the reality of 21^st century life.

And in this report the UK emerges relatively well – albeit not as well as Sweden but certainly and intriguingly better than some of our traditional competitors in global trade.

This McKinsey report is useful in many ways – not least by providing a reading list for policy developers for whom the new economic realities demand some fairly urgent reorientation.

Also worthy of note is the authors’ rejection of any notion that the impacts of the Internet might be analysed as an echo of Guttenberg’s press. Rather they prefer to liken the Internet to the advent of electricity – a descriptive choice that neatly aligns with the NextGen assertion that the current push for transformation of local digital access networks is akin to the switchover from DC to AC electricity.

Indeed the analysis and recommendations of the report reflect many of the themes being discussed in the NextGen Roadshows and will serve to bolster business modeling throughout the UK’s nascent NGA industry. Examples of Swedish network development as a platform for enterprise growth, in what the authors’ describe as the ‘ecosystem’, stands as a classic lesson in ‘first mover advantage’.(Note below)

The McKinsey team’s analysis makes clear the vital growth-enabling interdependencies between the public and private sectors. It also restates the themes evident in last year’s UN report on ‘Millennium Development Goals’ – that as a basic utility, as the ‘infrastructure for economic growth, innovation and societal development’, the call for management air-time should be heeded across all parts of the economy.

The skeptic may choose to dismiss the basis of the work as self-serving fuel for further consultancy. The authors, however, have declared an ‘Open Source’ stance – welcoming further inputs and calling for a vigorous ‘fact-based’ dialogue between all stakeholders.

Whether such debate can be sustained – whether the focus of study remains relevant for any other than historians – is another question. The speed with which digital network-enablement is impacting on all of our lives and across all cultures has shifted the debate from academic curiosity to everyday wallpaper in less than two decades. The protestations of those who still argue for a slower or more gradual pace of investment are increasingly exposed as admissions of resource capacity constraints within business models and commercial expectations that are ‘so last generation’.

Four years ago a speaker at one of those conferences urging faster and deeper digital investment asked delegates to reflect that by 2015 many observers would shake their heads and wonder why these truths were not already self-evident. That time has arrived and, being digitally driven, it has arrived a full 50% faster.

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Notes

This editorial was written for members of the UK's Communications Management Association (CMA) - a part of the BCS - the chartered institute for IT and Communications professionals.

Note ref leading position of Sweden:

In 2008 when Sweden was already established as European broadband leader a report written by ACREO on the impacts of broadband on the Swedish economy noted:

Previously only the most visionary saw broadband as an infrastructure of the same importance as other infrastructures such as roads and railways, water and electricity supply. Now these visions have reached the decision makers, and concrete goals and strategies in terms of increased broadband-access penetration start to be defined at the political level, and there is reason to believe that this will lead to proper action and funding for further broadband roll-out.

A further ACREO report on the socio-economic benefits of broadband is scheduled for publication later in 2011.