I’m trying to look for the unifying thread of the Access to Broadband Campaign’s conference this week. Here’s a stab at it.
There are three types of bit pipe available on the retail market today. There’s the world of gushing hot geysers of fiber. Not just for drinking, but you can water your lawn, run a steam engine and fill a swimming pool with it too. Then there’s the trickling spring of ADSL and cable “broadband”. Not insignificant, but hardly a tourist attraction. Lurking somwhere in the middle of this lot is also a motley bunch of wireless technologies. Finally you can drink your bits drip by drip via dial-up or basic ISDN. You won’t die and dessicate, but you’ll need to hold your head under that tap all day to stay alive. It’s the data equivalent of the twenty mile trek to obtain one pail of clean water.
In the economic sphere we already have a well-known and emotive term for the last case. We call it the Third World. It is a world of poverty and desperation. You don’t want to live there. You take serious precautions even when you visit. Expect encounters with officialdom to be expensive.
The first world is one of abundance; we worry about obesity and time management, not daily bread and shortened lifespans. If the price of riches is philosophical angst, then sign me up for the next class on Aristotle and Hegel.
In the middle is an uncomfortable second world. One of educated people striving to make the most of their knowledge and verve; yet the system — over which they have little control — crushes innovation and change from the edge.
Some good news first. The UK isn’t going to be a third world connectivity island. But on its current trajectory, it won’t be in the first world either. And that is a tragedy of epic proportions for the birthplace of the industrial revolution.
There are several sorry stories to emerge, and also tales of hope.
The saddest story is the government’s massive “investment” in extending dribbles of connectivity among the remoter bogs and brooks of Britain. (For overseas readers, I must explain that British governments no longer merely spend taxpayers’ money. Every piece of rubbish collected from the street is now classified as an investment in our childrens’ glowing future.) This is cementing the position of legacy telcos. When I hear that BT Scotland is a £16bn business employing 1 in 100 working Scots, I don’t see economic triumph. I see rapacious and ruinous cost backed by inefficiency and inaction. Did you see Stefan Agamanolis of Media Lab Europe give his presentation? If so, you can’t have a sliver of doubt that the applications of broadband that will drive new products, services and economic growth won’t be based on a 512kbit ADSL line.
Opting for second-class status butressed by support for BT and Thus will make us suitable only for consuming the digital exports of Korean, Scandinavian and (increasingly) Chinese youth. Even worse, we only get to eat the low-bandwidth leftovers that are already past their use-by date.
I was also saddened to see Scotland suffering from remote telecom regulation from London. BT’s own ADSL coverage map reveals Scotland as a tundra of the disconnected. If ever there was a case of Scotland needing Scottish solutions to Scottish problems, this is it. What sort of devolved parliament doesn’t even control the radio spectrum and communications wayleaves over its own land? OFCOM needs competition. That said, the Scottish public’s penchant for public sector over private capital could equally result in a new wooly and bureaucratic leech on innovation and taxpayers. But it’s a risk worth taking.
Now for some rays of hope.
Most obviously, the mere existence of grassroots campaign groups and the conference itself is cause for celebration. Need I say more?
The legacy telcos are haemorraging customers. Other European countries — the yardstick we measure ourselves by every day — are pulling ahead in competition policy and fibre deployment. Change is in the air. The political pressure can only rise. There isn’t any confidence at all in the voices of BT presenters. I sensed their fear of the audience with my own eyes and ears. They’re dying, breaking up under the contradictions of their own business model. Don’t sit around hoping for BT to connect you. You’ll turn blue and expire. It isn’t worth the wait.
I don’t care whether the fiber is laid by a replacement multinational megacorp or some local collective. But people out there are connecting themselves up, thank you very much. I also met many small commercial enterprises and ISPs rolling out local connectivity. Despite all the hoo-ha about global networks, telecom is an inherently local business. It’s about spanning physical geography with virtual circuits. You have to be there to do it. Furthermore, the Internet doesn’t care how many IP addresses you’ve got under your control. You don’t need to be a multinational telco to grab one and transit some packets on your own.
We’re in a new phase of capitalism. My own panel presentation was partly about how fibre networks create disproportionately more value to the customer than they do profit for the network operator. In every freely entered transaction, both parties are better off. It’s the bedrock of capitalism. But the relative amount to which they’re better off can change. The Paradox of the Best Network merely states that in a different way. So finally, I’d like to pick up on a message from Michael Wolff, who spoke up during the scenario planning session. His point was that relationship capital is the engine of future growth. Britain’s doesn’t have more brains than our competitors. We don’t have access to superior technology. Our comparative advantage is in relationship forming. And the intangible social capital of those relationships is precisely the same thing as the excess (unmonetised) consumer value from broadband networks. Moving back to Scotland from the US, you can’t help notice we’re a butt-ugly load of mongrels. Yet, despite our dowdy looks, there are things the British excel at. Forging business relationships over a beer. Spreading our English-speaking culture. Creating intimate friendships across old boundaries. Mediated by better technology and faster networks, we’ll lead the world in boozing, bragging and bonking. You have my word for it.
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