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conducted through one’s smart TV, and Richard painted a rosy picture of online GP appointments, reached via remote control, assuming that by 2034, the proposed date for the move to IP, all households will have upgraded their televisions to accommodate this. Dennis Reed heads up lobbying group Silver Voices, a membership organisation set up to remind government and business alike that older adults are a demographic that insists on being listened to. Most recently Silver Voices have been instrumental in overturning the Government’s proposed scrapping of the winter fuel allowance and are lobbying to extend provision for digital TV indefinitely. “The government assumes that, quite rightly, 99% the population currently has access to a TV set. Well, if it’s broadband only, it won’t be 99%. It’ll be more like 75%, so that’s 25% without that communication. It’s very frightening. I hope there is a rethink about it because it will damage society.” The software piece is even more concerning Pete’s dad wasn’t alone in experiencing confusion with parking apps and the software conundrum more generally. Free enterprise and capitalism have their perks, but saturating the market isn’t one of them and in the UK, according to the Times, there are currently over 30 parking apps in the UK alone. Downloading the correct app in an area with a poor network signal on a pay-as- you-go tariff, setting up a secure account and navigating it to actually pay for parking before you get a parking ticket is challenging; you don’t need to fall into any of the above demographics to find this experience frustrating. “Every business, every public service is pushing you onto apps and doing a doing away with analogue alternatives. It’s a really big issue for millions of older people.” Dennis is very angry. “I bet there’s around 10 million people at least who are struggling with the digital world, who don’t find it easy to do all the operations that you’re now being required to do in order to access services. GPs, for example, forcing people to go onto apps in order to make appointments.” He continued, “It’s about access to cash, it’s about banking. It’s about retail and not being able to access online offers. It’s sports events. It’s everything now. Every
business, every public service is pushing you onto apps and doing a doing away with analogue alternatives.” Complex and thorny Connectivity is often overlooked as it is not as straightforward as donating a laptop, nor seen as altruistic and tangible as providing training courses. “The connectivity piece is one of the biggest barriers,” Anderson explained. “We work with Vodafone through their Everyone Connected programme to provide SIM cards. There is a huge gap in the UK around how we can provide broadband to people who fundamentally can’t afford that £10, £12, month £15 social tariff. And it’s a problem we haven’t solved. If any of your readers want to get involved...” That’s just data on phones. It gets thornier again with broadband provision into people’s homes. Expensive to install and involving ongoing contracts, the Social Tariff started appearing on ISP websites from 2021, encouraged by Ofcom, offering those on Universal Credit and pension credits heavily discounted broadband access, courtesy of the ISPs themselves. It is effective up to a point, but critics say that £15 for families on Universal Credit will be a large monthly outlay to cover when they are already struggling to put food on the table, the implication being that it should be free, or nearly free. Paying that bill is only part of the expense, the industry has argued back. Connecting those homes comes with significant costs attached. Ben Allwright, former CEO and founder of Welsh ISP Ogi says, “It’s not up to the Altnets to connect and supply broadband for nothing, especially now,” referring to the overextending the sector has experienced, subscriber expectations not met and investment drying up. “It costs £600 to run a cable past the home and £400 to connect it; engineers need paying. We can do other things like community outreach – clear canals, mow fields, support village fêtes, but connecting homes and paying for it has to be the responsibility of the government.” Altnets are already doing an impressive job in local outreach, something that INCA have recognised in their awards for years. WightFibre for example commits to providing free or discounted broadband to community groups and charities, including community centres, digital hubs and village halls. These community organisations will promote that they have
always be an ageing population. And as any of us get older, their evidence shows, we will become less tech literate.”
The Digital Triumvirate
Digital inclusion straddles three areas, Paddy Paddison, CEO of INCA explained: hardware, skills and connectivity, of which data is a part. Government, charities and the private sector are all engaged in a multitude of efforts to include the excluded, and have been so for some time; there is a Digital Inclusion All-Party Parliamentary Group, the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee, Age UK, the Digital Poverty Alliance, Good Things Foundation, Carnegie UK Trust, People’s Health Trust, Silver Voices Ability. Net, Barclays, Google, Cityfibre, VM02, Vodafone, BT and as well as ISPs up and down the country, all supplying hardware, training and connectivity. Hardware This includes laptops, but it also includes mobile phone handsets and smart TVs, which are likely to play an increasingly important role in our homes in the coming years. At the recent SCTE ® Presents: TV to IP event in London, Richard Lindsay- Davies detailed some research conducted by Goldsmiths University for Ofcom on the bewildering, stress-inducing experience of smart TVs amongst older people. He drew attention to the physical reaction experienced by older users of television, citing the monitoring of furtive eye movement users displayed when confronted with the anxiety of navigating a vast, constantly changing user interface utterly different from the BBC1, BBC2, ITV, CH4, CH5 experience that dominated our screens for the latter half of the twentieth century. Ian Nock of Fairmile West was struck by elements of the report which noted that the usability of television interfaces is poor; there is a level of ‘forgetting’ of good design principles that is endemic today, combined with the challenges of giving people access to significantly more content than many of these interfaces were designed for. Lindsay-Davies felt that a return to pressing ‘1’ to get to BBC1, 2 for BBC2 and so on is vital if we are to cater for all audiences, all of whom pay their licence fee after all. The hope in future is that an all-IPTV future will take the pressure off the NHS, allowing doctor’s appointments to be
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DECEMBER 2025 Volume 47 No.4
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