.. 20 people who have just emerged after 4 years at a Buddhist retreat on the Isle of Arran. No (or very little) news, no internet, no connection with the outside world. Sounds pretty good to me...

My very real fear is that like the "No fixed abode" status, which is deliberately designed to "outcast" those folk who prefer to travel and live in mobile homes (in fact this is eminently sensible IF and WHEN the next ICE AGE comes upon us!), the lack of broadband and access to the internet will be used to outcast a whole raft of people who, for some extraordinary reason, actually want to live real lives rather than piss away their time (as the author is doing !) on the Internet.

Of course it'll become very suspicious that people do not want to use the internet and have their activity tracked 24/7. Mr. Plod will be able to arrest them for behaving in a suspicious manner likely to cause harm to online surveillance....

but at least they should have the option should they change their minds. The real story here is how many people are currently excluded altogether.

BTW, thanks for that Grauniad link, no, really: three minutes and I could feel my brain melting. Can't these people just shut up for five minutes and read something or listen to some music?

"... those people who are currently on the Internet, but think it's a bit rubbish really and are planning to bail out in the next 6 months and go back to reading books and chatting to their neighbours unless the quality improves."

Best case : their neighbours no longer want to talk to the snobby antisocial git next door so books are the only option. Hope the local bookshop hasn't closed!

Worst case : the neighbours don't want to talk to the paedophile/fraudster/thief/stalker/murderer/ next door. Of course, if they find out he's a hacker a lynch mob or mockery from local kids would probably be on the agenda.

We live in a free society don't we? Free choice and all the rest of it except when it comes to the TV Licensing authority when you are presumed to have a TV and the onus of contrary proof is on you or risk being hounded for the rest of your life.

Providers like TalkTalk bundle broadband into your phone services anyway so it is "free". You don't have to use it, but the choice to do so by simply plugging in an Internet device is there.

How did OFCOM survey these people, that's what I wanna know. Did they have a survey on their website? Knowing OFCOM, I wouldn't put it past them.

It's true, the Internet isn't as good as it used to be: I remember the massive drop in quality when AOL first shat its load onto Usenet, although that was but a pimple compared to the unrelenting moronic WebTV hordes....

Every pensioner I know has Freeview, yet still buys the Daily Hate on a Saturday to get the TV guide just like they always have. I point out that Freeview has an in-built guide and that it's always seven days ahead, meaning you don't end up on a Friday night not knowing what's on tomorrow, but they're just not interested in 'fancy' things like that.

No surprise that none of them have computers either, let alone broadband. In one household, the wife still gets out a heavy 1950s typewriter whenever they want to write a letter.

Oh, and that same household still buys films on VHS tapes and complains that they're getting hard to find these days and sometimes thay have to get them on those DVDs instead. They have a very expensive DVD Recorder that some salesman from Currys was able to persuade them to buy but they still stick to VHS and percieve DVDs as some kind of fallback plan for when the 'proper' thing isn't available. And they really don't understand why VHS releases are becoming hard to find, swearing blind it's one big racket.

You're not going to make these people go online. If they refuse to switch from paper TV guides to the EPG listings, they're not going to switch to the BBC news and weather websites or iPlayer, letalone Twitter, Faceache or MyBrain.

They fought two world wars, all they want is to be left alone! All of which gives me a great idea - Why not relocate them to the peaceful and scenic rural areas where you can't get broadband anyway, and let the "Countryfolk 2.0" move into the big smoke to get online at last?

"..One of the main policy objectives of the report will be to increase broadband penetration..."

Why? Yes, why? I'm sure that many El Reg commenters can flood this page with 'good' reasons for having a broadband connection at home. I myself get withdrawal symptoms when I'm away from home, so I got a netbook and a mobile broadband PAYG stick (a nice combo!).

The Government have set a target (of sorts) but have they stopped to ask 'why' this is important? Has any analysis been done of the cost/benefit of making the effort to do this, or is it a 'good thing' that must be pushed at all costs? One thing is for sure, when the Government sets a target, anyone who resists that target or gets in its way will be regarded as an enemy of the state and will be regarded as needing some serious re-education.

I doubt much that Ofcom interviewed people who had trouble buying food for their survey. They tend to be hard to reach and the sorts of people you need to hire to visit them tend not to work well with corporate IT types. So I suspect that Kerberos pretty much nailed this with respect to the Ofcom survey. Use to help with a convention that cost $40 to attend for three days. Starbucks latte drinkers bitched to no end when we bumped the fee by $5, which was less than one of their damn latte's cost.

Wow. People who either don't want or cannot afford internet. Whodathunkit?

Will someone please tell me what Twitter *does*? I'm as "into" frivolous crap as the next person, possibly more so than some, but I cannot for the life of me see the point of these innane one-liners. The world + twitter = an episode of Ripping Yarns from where I sit.

Nitwit@someplace - "Just heard about Howard Molson's Shovel. Bummer"

Moron@somotherplace - "And it wer a spr&jcksn no3 2!

Nitwit@someplace - "Not just a number three - it had nickel scoop"

Moron@someotherplace - "jst had blk pddng - evn wht bts blk"

ANOTHERMORON@SHOUTYPLACE - "NE 1 CHK RAINGAYGE O/S TWN HLL 2 DAY?"

You are writing absolute crap. Haven't you even met any pensioners? Do you know how much money they have to live on? Have you not seen any of the publicity on national television over the last 3 years about OAPs not having enough money to live on?

Every single penny they receive matters to them.

Must agree, my father in law (70) got frustrated when he couldn't find the rewind button on the DVD player a few years back...seriously, not joking.

Ha! I got you beat. My mother insisted the pause button on her VCR didn't work while recording because the people on the TV kept moving when she pushed it. (This was years ago, before there was such a thing as a DVR).

> If someone says they can't afford a computer with the internet, they are talking crap quite frankly.

This frankness is based upon you being a moron presumably?

> You just can't predict old(er) people.

Heh, folk forget that old people die and you get different old people. Just the same way that young people grow up and you get new young people. They even report it as "old peoples' tastes have changed...kids have changed"

Yes they have changed, but only in the completely literal sense that they aren't the same people that had the different tastes.

It is funny, for example, how many TV adverts and media still perpetuate the myth from 2 or 3 decades ago that parents and grandparents can't or don't use computers, especially female relatives, like mothers and aunts.

It's as stupidly wrong as the idea that their 13 year old kids are (or were) computer whizz kids or geniuses.

But the truth is, even if there was an element of truth that only kids used computers, played computer games, or surfed the internet. The kids that supposedly did this are now in their 40s, 50s and 60s and potentially have kids and grandkids of their own.

Is there any link between having kids and losing the ability to change channel on a TV?

Well, no, perhaps the reason some tech folk don't wash and have no girlfriends is because they fear this will happen. But rest assured there's no correlation at all.

So, whatever %age of Ofcom's figures are old people or whatever scheme or scam someone comes out with to take Government money under the guise of encouraging old people's broadband adoption it isn't worth worrying about. The thing is the scam is guaranteed to work over time, simply because future generations of old people already have broadband and want it....so caveat emptor when you see the schemes appear, they are just to funnel public money into someone's pockets.

Because as I said, old people change in quite a literal way. They die, and are replaced by yesterday's young people.

This next generation of old people will probably have tastes that are old, but not Val Doonican and Jim Reeves or steam trains or WW2. Led Zeppelin, The Who and the Rolling Stones and so on and so on....and then Iron Maiden and the Eurythmics and Duran Duran.

They'll use the internet if they are now (assuming they can afford it, but poverty is a young person's game as much as an old one)