"Most of the commentary on the crisis in the economics disciplines since the credit crunch has focussed on the problems within banking and insurance.

The report sponsored by CISCO on the international state of broadband is making me reflect on how the IT disciplines are themselves impacted by the problems within economics.

Let me explain. Britain has one of the most competitive and lowest cost regimes for telecoms in the world. Yet, the CISCO report puts the UK at 25th in the world in terms of preparedness for next generation networks. Even if you want to quibble about methodologies and so on, I hear no-one arguing that actually we are number 1 or 5. To market fundamentalists this should not be so."