Marchwood does have problems, for sure, but there are other areas of the Forest where users are only able to check an email account once in every few weeks due to poor or near-non-existent service – looking at web pages? Forget it. I recently emailed an Internet user in a part of the New Forest with good service, who then referred me to her colleague in a more remote area. She added at the end of the email, “don’t be surprised if she doesn’t get back to you straight away. Her service is so bad, she only bothers connecting once a month as it is so time-consuming it can take all day just to get a connection and check email.”

Getting online is only half the problem in the New Forest though. I note that you write that for certain Marchwood residents, watching the BBC iPlayer is but a dream. This is true. The ‘Waterside Parishes’ of the New Forest have variable connectivity and a large population that puts great pressure on what service there is. The problems do not stop there however. While entertainment (and the needs of business, which you also address here) are certainly an issue, the provision of information about local issues by key organisations of governance in the New Forest is also an issue. It’s as though (connectivity aside) the Internet has come late to this part of Hampshire.

One of the major problems affecting the New Forest as a broad and varied community is that, once online, many of its organisations of governance are simply not geared up to meet the expectations of an Internet savvy population. It’s as though the penny has only just dropped with regard to the need to provide reliable content about local issues by organisations such as New Forest District Council, the local Parish councils (some are better than others) and the National Park Authority (which, since its inception, has had an impact on most people’s lives in both big and small ways).

These organisations of governance just don’t seem to understand simple issues concerning the Internet and how best to use it to strengthen the community links that you speak of here. A good example of this is the decision earlier this year by the National Park Authority (the NPA) to reorganise its website and reshuffle the content. Every local business, hotelier, B&B, community organisation or individual user who had web pages linking to specific content on the National Park Authority website, suddenly found that their links were broken because the NPA didn’t understand the basics when it came to maintaining a central mine of information that their site represented.

To give a brief picture of what this actually meant, one New Forest site operator had to rebuild 180+ links to content on the NPA site because everything had moved and users were getting ‘Page not Found’ messages. Crucial information concerning planning issues, issues affecting businesses, community matters, local events, key contact information, and so on, was lost and, as a community, we had to start rebuilding our links to key sources of information to keep people informed (including, ironically, information about how to get online).

At the other end of the scale, New Forest District Council has an abundance of micro-sites that seem to constantly spring up and then disappear or get mothballed once they are met with a near-total lack of interest in their paltry PR offerings. Articles languish on these micro-sites, quickly becoming out of date, and leaving those that CAN get online in the New Forest feeling that there is a skills vacuum from their key local information providers, or a lack of will to provide local content that is relevant and useful.

In the New Forest, the truth is that while getting online can be possible if support, encouragement and technical assistance is available, once you do you find that our central agencies that should have been taking a far more active lead are themselves only just getting to grips with what the Internet can offer its community (and for the most part they are getting it wrong).

Don’t access the other address unless you want to buy a bible.