Super-fast broadband: 21st century technology, 19th century politics
So, in a speech today Gordon Brown will tell us that super-fast broadband is ‘the electricity of the digital age‘. So what does that make electricity, Einstein? The ‘coal’?
Sorry, that was a cheap shot. I actually think it’s an excellent aspiration (we can’t call it a policy because we’re not permitted to have a ‘legitimate expectation‘ that it will be enacted) and hope it comes to pass. Brown says it ‘must be for all – not just for some’.
I’m a firm believer that a lack of access to information is the greatest driver to disillusionment, disenfranchisement and disengagement. I’ll never forget when, a few years back when we were on our uppers, the Citizens Advice Bureau told us that the bank we needed off our backs for little while would regard newspapers as a ‘luxury’.
Being poor carries with it hidden traps as well as the stresses and worry – you only have to look at the level of unclaimed benefits in this country to see the dangerous ignorance it fuels. Being informed (however modestly) can be one of the first things out the window.
Brown’s announcement, however, is being framed in the already sickening negativity surrounding the run up to the general election and the media coverage of it. The Tories have announced a similar aspiration (good for them) but, according to the BBC, have ‘attacked’ Labour over its plan for an annual £6 (50p a month) levy to pay for its own plan.
Maybe the Tories did ‘attack’ the Labour plan. It’s quite possible that the Tories are trying to be partisan over this although to try and make 50p a month look like clear blue water between them and Labour seems pathetic in the extreme. It seems such a piffling amount of money to prevent a cross-party consensus on an issue that will provide the poorest with what a lot of us take for granted.
However, with the BBC not providing a Tory quote (either attributed or otherwise), it’s difficult to know what form this ‘attack’ takes and from whom it’s coming. It looks like a decent idea brought low by either a piss-poor political spat or piss-poor journalism.
So, here’s today’s score. If you don’t what to know, look away now: politics was the loser.
Posted on March 22nd, 2010 at 9:17am under Eye Catching Initiatives, New Labour, Science and progress, Tories
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More interestingly, how does Labour expect to square this provision of essential services via broadband for all with the DEB’s draconian powers of disconnection?
One imagines, like the deserving and undeserving poor, we shall all be designated deserving or undeserving superfast broadband recipients.
I can see it now. Dad loses job, want to go online to myGov to sign on for appropriate benefits, but can’t because his son has been downloading music and their broadband has been disconnect. It’ll be the workhouse all over again.
Christ, did I really make that many typos?
1. “wants to go” not “want to go”
2. “downloading music illegally”
3. “been disconnected” not “been disconnect”.
Gah!
Superfast Broadband? Now where have we heard that before?……………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Got it?
Flashbackwards (Go on try it, its easy. You know you want to).
It’s 1996. “New” Labour Conference. Blair (remember him) announces, to much fanfare, a deal with BT that the incoming “New” Labour Government will, in return for removing the asymmetry rule, deliver a UK “broadband network of the future” for a digital Britian as part of a wider European digital network, using “new” fibre optic technology.
Now for the technical bit. The speed of any system is determined by its slowest componant.
It’s all very well sticking high grade fibre optic cable in the ground in high density urban areas and between big corporations and organisations – Mercury did that in the 80′s with their ‘figure of eight loop’. But if you are talking “Universal Service Obligations” – which BT still has and which OFCOM would like to get rid of if favour of “free competition” (OFCOM’s equivilant of the Catholic church’s rhythm method doctrine) – then the consumer drones you are trying to reach need the same thing at the level of what is known as the “local loop”.
Or, as us telephone engineers say, the ‘D’ (for distribution) side of the network.
And that’s what Blair was talking about at the 1996 Conference. Fibre optic cable down to the local level so that uploading as well as downloading speeds common on high grade data circuits common to big organisations could be delievered into the home – even if you were in a crofters cottage on Mull (the USO).
But it all went tits up. The cost at the time was put at between £20-30 billion – or to put another way a lot less then, say, invading and occupying large parts of the Middle East.
First snag was “New” Labour’s first budget – with Brown’s one off utilities tax which took away a sizable pot of investment money. However, this was only the warm up act.
Shortly afterwards we had the 3G auction where companies almost bankrupted themselves trying to outbid each other for the 3G wireless spectrum sell off. Funnily enough that raised an amount of money for the Government not far off the top end of the scale of that £20-30 billion mentioned above.
So now all the investment money for a proper fibre optic network of the future has been pissed away in a three card find the lady trick not a million miles away from the way the author Terry Pratchett lays out in his satirical story “Going Postal” – with the UK Government playing the part of the Grand Trunk Company.
So what to do. Well, those charged with actually delivering it used technology, in the form of DSL, to sweat more out of the copper and aluminium cable network of the 20th century. A lot of which has been in the ground (and overhead) for decades.
Sure it was faster than a 56k modem by a long way. But when first introduced the speeds were only just above existing ISDN technology. And the roll out was painfully slow on account of BT having got rid of shed loads of decent leaders (i.e. proper managers who know their arse from a hole in the ground) and experienced engineers in the early 90′s.
Consequently, it took some time to roll out the ADSL technology to every Telephone Exchange in the country. And though it was sold and marketed as “Broadband” there was no way this was what Blair promised.
Thing is, the pair of wires your phone is connected to is probably copper (or if you are unlucky aluminium – which, whilst lighter than copper, corrodes easier after a while and falls apart when you breathe on it). Its part of a local distribution cable that will have maybe 5, 10, 15 or 20 pairs of wires feeding other subscribers in your street.
This will in turn be jointed onto a larger local D side cable – say 50 or 100 pair – before dissapearing into a green street “cabinet” to be “jumpered” to the Exchange (‘E’) side cable. Which is also likely to be copper (but not ali.)
The diameter of each pair of wires is unlikely to be larger than 0.5mm. This is important to prevent crosstalk and data losses in pairs of wires packed tightly together in the cables. Once upon a time it was necessary to use 0.9mm wires (which is quite thick) and an aliminuim transverse screen seperator inside the cable for data cables to prevent signal and data crossover.
DSL helps to some extent but with all those individual small diameter wires packed tightly together the equipment in the exchanges can only do so much to alleviate the data handling limitations of last century’s copper network. That’s why at certain times of the day, when everyone is on line in your locality that the speed drops.
That is why it is NOT “broadband” as properly understood in the industry. It’s a bastardised form of broadband. Martketed as such to hide the fact that the promises of 1996 ended up as hot air. It’s why internet speeds in the UK are lower than what a couple of decades ago were regarded as emerging nations.
And the relevance to the latest announcement is that they are going through the same marketing bullshit.
In 1997 it was going to cost £20-30 billion at 1997 prices. Today thay are talking in terms of something in the region of £1.8 billion (about £180 million a year over 10 years) to take fibre down to the level of the green street cabinet (known as the Primary Cross Connection Point – PCCP). This will again take a good number of years – at least ten looking at the £1.8 billion investment profile we had briefed out to us last summer.
And it is unlikely that there will be any significant level of fibre to the property – i.e. peoples homes – beyond the Cabinet. After all, the great god of “competition” which demanded the unbundling of the local loop so that other carriers like Virgin (which as least does have some network of its own to be fair), Talk Talk, etc. can get their slice of the pie selling you something as “broadband” or “superfast broadband” which in no way deserves to be called “Broadband”.
This technology had potential and what I’ve described so far is only a part of the story of how “New” Labour and its corporate privateer friends strangled that potential at birth and continue to ensure that the potential is never reached but used instead to sell shit to the masses. But that’s another story.