"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage
Comment: What does broadband mean? [PC Pro] 15:27
'What does broadband mean?' might sound like a stupid question, but a spate of new 'broadband' services are leading many to ask whether the word has lost its meaning.
Not only are connections which offer only slightly more than twice the speed of dial-up being called broadband - 128 and 150K services from the likes of NTL and Tiscali for instance - but the increased take-up of ADSL in some urban areas is reportedly having a significant decelerating affect on 512K users contending for one fiftieth of a busy pipe.
To cap it all, Supanet has just launched a 'broadband-enabled' 60Kbps service; that's a whole 4Kbps faster than dial-up. Industry-regulator Ofcom defines broadband at 128Kbps.
Questionable speeds are only part of the problem. The latest initiative from the ISPs in order to get monthly charges below £20 is to introduce hefty capping - limiting the amount of traffic to your computer to 2GB or 3GB per month.
That may sound a lot, but average it out over 30 days and it makes a mockery paying the extra for a broadband connection. Three gigabytes over a month is 100MB per day. Now consider the limitations of that when engaging in perfectly legal, typical online activities. (The effect of P2P file-sharing is a separate issue, given its dubious legality.)
In a single day you could view streamed media, download software - including recommended security updates, hold a video or voice conference via instant messaging software, play an online game and buy music (at around 4MB per song an album could add up to over 50MB). And if the Internet connection is shared amongst two or three computers in a household or small business, usage will be multiplied.
At what point does the combination of bandwidth, capping, contention and usage render broadband as a meaningless description. It is something that Ofcom needs to address, though its recent pronouncement at the ISPA Awards that the industry should self-regulate was not promising.
MP Michael Fabricant is campaigning for a new definition of broadband. In a speech to the Access to Broadband Campaign Conference in January, he argued that the current definition is '"Always On". And that's it.
'But you and I know,' he continued, 'that a fast pipe should be the criterion.' Because it is not, one in ten 'broadband' users are unhappy with the speed of their connection.
Supanet's 60Kbps service illustrates this perfectly. Spokesman Adrian Kerr said, 'We've found there is a genuine interest in a package that may be the same speed as dial-up, but gives customers the other benefis of true broadband packages: an always-on connection and the ability to use the phone and surf at the same time.' He added that a new less ambiguous description would be on the website by tomorrow, but under some definitions of the term the service can be legitimately labelled broadband.
'Broadband' these services may be, but whether they provide a true broadband experience is questionable.
We are constantly being told, by government, by analysts and by business, how important broadband is to the economy. We run the risk of diluting the experience to such an extent that people begin to switch off.
We also risk being left behind. As BT and the ISPs continue to divide up the existing ADSL capacity, other countries are investing technologies that, in the case of Japan, are already delivering 100Mbps services.
UK ISPs are quick to defend themselves, and to be fair they have a strong case. With one or two exceptions, they have to make do with the services that BT makes available to them, through its near monopoly of exchanges. Local loop unbundling was meant to dilute BT's dominance, but up to now has failed to do so, although interest in it is being rekindled.
There is also the suspicion that BT's presence on the retail side - through both BT Openworld and BT Retail - has a strong bearing on what it decides to do on the wholesale side. It would be interesting to see the effect of excluding BT from retail altogether, forcing its efforts into developing a truly competitive broadband infrastructure, which would be a much better way of getting prices down than usage capping.
Simon Aughton