Can Mobile Broadband Solve the UK Digital Divide? 113
MJackson writes "Lord Carter's interim Digital Britain report recently proposed a new Universal Service Obligation (USO), which would effectively make it mandatory for every household in the UK to have access to a broadband service capable of 2Mbps by 2012. Since then there has been much talk about Mobile Broadband (3G, 4G) services being used to bridge the UK Digital Divide, but is that realistic? The technology has all sorts of problems from slow speeds and high latency to blocking VoIP, MSN Instant Messaging and aggressive image compression ... not to mention connection stability."
2Mbps By 2012? (Score:1, Interesting)
As of right now Japan has, what, an average of 100 Mbps for less cost than a 1Mbps package in the UK, where available? They're falling so far behind it's just sad. And they're aspiring for an increase of 1Mb 3 years from now? It's almost like they're determined not to upgrade.
Re:USO sounds like a really great plan (Score:4, Interesting)
To be perfectly fair, even the UK doesn't have the population density necessary for this. Yes, the UK does tend to be more dense than the US, though British cities tend to be densely packed around a town center, rather than sprawling like US cities. There's often very little incentive to fill in the gaps between cities, given just how few people live in these areas.
How about the remote/rural areas of Korea and Japan? Do they have good broadband access?
(I honestly have no idea about the answer to this... perhaps somebody else could chime in who knows more. Contrary to popular belief, Asia is far from being one big city)
Yes and No (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, in the sense that, with a little strategic gaming, cell derived wireless technology is almost certainly the cheapest way to minimally satisfy whatever universal service obligations end up being imposed. Unlike landline buildout, where you'll actually need to spend real, verifiable money building real, verifiable connections to every lower-income hovel that you can't be bothered to bother with; a wireless "universal" system could simply involve tacking a horrifically crippled lowest tier option onto the infrastructure you are already building to sell to cost-insensitive business types.
It is fairly likely that, unless astonishingly carefully drafted by public spirited experts, the USO will underspecifiy what is actually required to access the internet pleasantly. You'll be able to satisfy the requirements by demonstrating the availability of an X megabit connection from at least one top floor flat per postcode, while saving money and/or upselling hard, by blocking like crazy anything that isn't vanilla port 80, and not really bothering about latency, packet loss, and spotty connections among your less preferred customers.
Don't get me wrong, the mobile stuff has its place, since you can't really trail a fiber line around behind you when you move about. As a means of "universal access", though, I strongly suspect that it is a good solution only in that it will be the cheapest way to offer something nominally resembling an internet connection, not by virtue of actually being any good.
In particular, my concern would be the effect on the development of the internet. Available bandwidth spurs development of new uses for the internet, which spurs greater demand for bandwidth, which spurs improvement of bandwidth supply, and so forth. Reliance on extremely expensive or crippled internet access guts that. If the internet access is costly or lousy, interesting uses of it will stagnate or shrivel. If they do that, the stagnant status quo is under no pressure to upgrade, and there things stay.
Re:2Mbps By 2012? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:USO sounds like a really great plan (Score:3, Interesting)
very little downside except short term funding issues.
Which puts it among a vast, vast quantity of things for which the only downside is that... they must be paid for.
If you think that short term funding issues should take precedence over long term societal growth, then by all means reject this proposal.
Please qualify "societal growth." What aspect of society is growing? And are we going to need to hand out free computers as well to realize the benefits?
If you can show me some major life-altering benefits, I may be convinced. But I must admit I am having some difficulty thinking what is so important about broadband that trumps $5 a month dialup which is available to anyone with a phone line. Surely streaming HD video and playing First Person Shooters isn't what counts for 'societal growth'? Connecting people to news and other information works plenty well at 56k.
We must also consider that the remaining places that lack high-bandwidth availability are also generally those that would gain the least by having it.
I do certainly agree that laying fiber all across America would be pretty cool, but I'm just not convinced that the benefits over what we have now are going to match the massive cost of doing so.
I should also point out that there is a certain boon for waiting to overhaul your infrastructure, in that, while you wait, technology advances. It gets both cheaper and more awesome. Yeah, Korea may be already mapped out with fiber, but how often are they planning to replace that entire infrastructure? If that's going to be their internet backbone for the next 30 years, well, it would suck if in the next 5 years there is some major advancement, and they have to spend the next 25 lagging behind everyone else. If we wait until such an overhaul is makes economic sense to us, we not only save over the short term, but we get all that extra technological advance thrown in for later.
Re:overload (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree that it's unsuitable for lots of tasks, but the government's really only thinking about web and e-mail when they talk about broadband; 3G/4G should suffice for the majority of users. Well, it would be better than nothing, and ultimately it's the price they have to pay for living in the middle of nowhere.
The biggest problem with 3G is going to be coverage; as you say, Cheltenham's OK, but I find as soon as you drive around the Cotswolds, you quickly drop down to GPRS. And when you get the train down to London, there's no 3G signal all down the Stroud valley until you emerge at Swindon - that's half the journey. Hell, Kemble station can't even get enough signal to maintain a phone call. And as soon as you get 10 minutes outside Swindon, you lose 3G again.
If they can't sort it out in relatively high-populated rural areas or commuter train lines, I wouldn't hold out much hope if I lived in the highlands - the business case for putting up a tower for 10-20 people to use once in a blue moon is so weak it means they'll be the last to get it.
Re:overload (Score:1, Interesting)
The P2P iPlayer is regarded as an EPIC FAIL inside the BBC, and the developers as smelly no-mates losers no-one likes. The Flash iPlayer is a huge and popular success and is basically the app to drive total consumer bandwidth levels up.
(anon for obvious reasons)
There is no digital divide in the UK (Score:3, Interesting)
The chattering classes have been going on about this for at least 10 years. In fact however, people live where they want to live, taking into account of what services are available when they do so, and they spend their money on what they want to spend it on. Some are heavily computerized and networked, others are not. And they are fine with it. Just like some people spend their money on vacations on the Costa Brava, and others spend it on books or motor boats. There is not a boating divide, or a book divide or a holiday divide. There are just people with different priorities.
This whole thing consists of people who are technologically illiterate proclaiming loudly that other people should get connected and computered, for reasons that feel like they make sense to them, but which make no sense to the objects of their attention. The same technical illiterates are demanding ever increasing use of computers in libraries and education, without having the slightest idea why this would improve either, and without ever having used a spreadsheet or IDE in anger or a computer as a learning tool. It is, to put it at its most absurd, people whose knowledge of computers is limited to writing memos in Word, telling the rest of us how important computer literacy is.
And making up ridiculous expressions like 'digital divide' to cover the fact that they are talking about absolutely nothing.