Most of us lead busy lives. Maybe we don’t always take enough time for moments of reflection.

Anyone returning to work or school or home-life after a holiday or business trip will know that ‘back to reality’ readjustment.

After a week spent guiding a study group from the Forth Valley and Lomond area of central Scotland, helping them discover the possibilities of high quality local broadband networks and the smooth efficiency of Swedish society, the strain of returning to reality was not entirely unexpected. This last week was perhaps the best and the worst of times to be cut off from broadband.

Sitting here sans email, sans Internet, sans Skype, ‘one leg dis’, with a report promised to the client by the end of the week but still unsent, there was plenty of time to reflect on how good quality broadband connectivity has become so central to our lives.

Time to reflect that, when questioned last week, a Swedish local network operator was hard-pressed to recall even a handful of fibre failures in the last two years

Time to reflect that Ofcom’s great moment last week was a move to ensure that the UK would have a plentiful future supply of telephone numbers.

Time to reflect that in Sweden the week before we heard reports of their regulator (PTS) helping municipal networks with applications for EU grant funding to enable expansion of high quality local access and the consequential consignment of last generation telephony to the dustbins of history.

Time to reflect that Samsung are now reportedly set to launch in the UK a smart mobile ‘android-driven’ phone that has every possible feature except any provision for a sim-card to connect to a mobile phone network. This ‘phone’ assumes that all connectivity will be via WiFi into a fixed higher-quality broadband network

Time to reflect that in Sweden much of the success of the country’s mobile networks (and reduced communications costs for enterprises and the public sector) can be traced to the availability of a fully automated trading platform for low-cost dark fibre connections. 

Time to reflect that last week the latest downloadable application offered to those already overwhelmed by emails was a free service to send repeated email reminders for every email stacked up in your overloaded ‘too much to deal with right now’ box!

Time to reflect that just before we headed off to Sweden, newspapers reported the plans of London-based financial services companies to ask their employees to work online from home during the 2012 Olympic games . . . at the same time as the kids are at home on holiday?

Time perhaps, in this broadband-free zone, to reflect on why the fully-fibred, locally-adapted, economic-growth-driving, socially-cohesive, administrative money saving penny has not yet dropped in the minds of governments, regulators, economic analysts or the media.

Time to reflect that, like the responses from banks that are ‘too big to fail’, we should not underestimate the lengths to which some will go to resist physical rather than the fudge of functional separation of their basic utility operations from their more complex or riskier competitive services.

Time to reflect that those that really do understand the extent to which the UK’s last generation infrastructure is creaking at the seams are entirely right to be scared.

Time to reflect that we should never underestimate the tactics of those charged with making sure that any independent network investment initiatives are nobbled at the earliest opportunity.

Time to reflect that four days without Internet access provides ample opportunity to think through the consequences of an unequally disconnected society and all who try to work in her.

And finally, time to reflect that the notion of looking around, of discovering fresh perspectives, of seeing things from different angles and in different lights, is, for an island race, extraordinarily powerful and potentially deeply upsetting.  Why is the blindingly obvious so easily thrown off course by the obviously blind?

This last week in Scotland the homecoming delegates from our Community Study Tour will also have been challenged to readjust.  Our hope is simply this - that their imaginations have been stretched and that those stretched imaginations will not now go back to their original shape.