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The politics of broadband
By jpenston | May 29, 2007 |
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“Winning ugly” is an expression commonly used in sport. How you play is less important than the results you achieve - at least when the stakes are high and competition intense. But, when participants put their results ahead of their principles, something of the beautiful game dies.
Ah, the beautiful game! The golden glow of ideology that keeps communities together…
The internet community has its own ideology. Open access, flat rate pricing. Ubiquity. Quite communist in fact.
But just as communism was shown to be inconsistent with competition, so we are seeing the destruction of the internet ideology by the intense competition for broadband access of the early 21st century. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Companies are [forced to] / [choose to] play ugly to win. The last bastion, ubiquity, is once more under threat as the largest providers decide that there should be one price for those with LLU and another, higher price, for those without.
We have been here before, sort of. The phased rollout of broadband between the late 1990s and 2005, saw many instances where your address determined whether you got superfast (512k) broadband or were stuck in the slow lane with dial up (56k). The ubiquity returned as BT pre-empted calls for a universal service obligation by announcing that it would offer broadband to 99.6% of the population. Unless you were in that 0.4%, you would be able to participate in “the revolution” regardless of what size animal your telephone exchange was.
So here we go again. Now that some can get supersuperfast broadband (24M), having only superfast broadband is again being touted as a social disadvantage. Is it? No one can say for sure, although that hasn’t stopped people trying to paint a doomsday version of UK Plc as a third world country because we can only get 2M in the villages. Before you get too carried away though, consider genuine third world countries are still only connected by satellites to the backbone, with 500ms round-trip times. I live in a village and can only get about 2.4M, but take it from me, it’s not third world.
Ofcom’s response is interesting insight into political tap-dancing. To the service providers, Ofcom “can understand” their dilemma but (to the public), their hands are tied “it would be for the Department of Trade and Industry to decide whether to extend the USO to broadband”
It makes me wonder who Ofcom is representing? The government, the industry or the people? They have created the competition in the market today, which has brought a huge number of benefits to what was once a stagnant pool of underdeveloped metal beneath our streets. Are they washing their hands of the consequences? Policy has been so successful at creating competition that players in the market like AOL sometimes have to win ugly just to survive. Is Ofcom a proponent of the beautiful game…? Probably not, but I think we should be told.
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Topics: BT, Ofcom, digital divide |