Her Majesty’s Government is known to be
less than impressed with the efforts of the new UK
telecommunications “cartel” that is mostly now represented
by just three players: BT, Telewest and NTL. HMG is nevertheless
very happy to have taken £24bn from this gullible industry over
the matter of cellphones.
The slow speed of rollout of so-called
“broadband” services has attracted much comment, and various
initiatives have been tried to get telcos to wire up the further
reaches of the empire – places like remote crofts in the
Shetlands. Go to Google and type in “grant highlands Scotland
broadband” and you will be regaled by many millions of
pounds-worth of announcements of efforts to keep the picts in
their remote crofts using a solutions that’s a lot more
expensive than Hadrian’s Wall ever was.
The latest news is that BT Openworld has
cut a deal, mostly in camera according to industry sources who
feel cut out from being able to compete in the bid, with Israeli
satellite service company Gilat, to import 2-way satellite
systems that will offer barely ISDN performance to those
locations that cannot get services any other way., To describe
the proposed service as “broadband” is to pervert the
terminology even more than usual. A single satellite transponder
can generally handle a total bandwidth of around 35Mbits, so
let’s do a few sums, and you will discover that all the
satellite capacity across Europe does not equate to a single
strand of modern wave division multiplex fibre..
10,000 users of 35Mbit means each user gets
3500bps. I had a dial up modem in 1985 that did better than
that. I have no doubt at all that those involved will wave their
arms expansively and talk about contention ratio, and worst case
scenarios, but the fact of the matter is that the use of
satellite for 2-way internet services is purely to kid the
nation that BT can deliver “broadband” to anywhere – and
thus Her Majesty’s Government can kid a few more voters that
the job is getting done. (To be more specific, it’s actually
an Italian ISP and Israeli equipment maker being fronted by BT
Openworld.)
So when you read about broadband in this
context, remember that HMG’s own report defines broadband as:
“services provided at speeds of
2Mbit/s and over. “
(see http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk/publications/reports/broadband/contents.htm)
But why does a rural population want to
migrate to hell-holes like Glasgow or London anyway..? I don’t
think it’s assurances of the availability of ISDN or even
ADSL. In a very short space of time, this government, which made
up of assorted metropolitan bigots and their chums from the
urban glitterati in the outposts of Islington and Hampstead, has
done its level best to dismantle the way of country life that
has sustained the rural community in the UK for a few thousands
of years.
The effort to bring broadband to the outer
reaches of Hebrides and to establish the University of the
Highlands and Islands are typical vacuous but politically
correct gestures from this government (remember, the PM is
Scottish, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is Scottish and so are
numerous other ministers – and Scotland has now got its own
parliament, don’t forget).
Since much of the premise supporting the
case for rural broadband is distance learning, then why does it
need to exist as another costly institution anyway..? This
actually raises a key issue for all of us concerned with the
PM’s fixation of “education, education, education” – and
that is “duplication, duplication, duplication”.
Consider the idea of having all students in
a subject taught by the very best tutors, and beamed around he
country (or world) to individual desktops as either live
interactive sessions, or as VoD. Why not have the top Maths
teacher in front of a camera and synchronised whiteboard to
teach all the kids in a specific (and easily filtered audiences
based on readily assessed abilities, through the medium of
telecommunications..? Unlike the so-called “broadband” or
“turbo internet” services, using satellite for broadcast on
the basis of one to many is an eminently sensible use of the
medium.
I’ll tell you why, the educational
establishment in this and other countries is scared to death of
the idea. The educational system provides many a sinecure for
the marginally talented to hide away in peace and quite from the
real world, and the last thing they want is competition for
their jobs, and easy exposure of their inadequacies. Ironically,
the biggest duffers with the most to lose (and hide) tend to be
those further up the food chain, the teachers at the coal face
are generally worked to death and conscientious – and
specifically being kept away from the revolutionary technology
that would transform their lives.
The last word goes to the headline from
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/who/elld/Innovation2.asp?myEvent_ID=343
SCOTTISH EXECUTIVE PUBLISHES REPORT ON
KNOWLEDGE ECOMONY (sic)
“The report commits the Executive to
spending more than £40m over the next 3 years to help Scotland
develop into a knowledge-based, globally competitive, inclusive
economy.”
So yes, I think perhaps these folks do need
the education, after all.
But let them pay for themselves, in the
same way that farmers are now being told to pay for the next
bout of foot and mouth. Some of us are very weary of watching
the quangos and political fellow travellers of this government
eking out their sinecures (which is paid for in part from
taxation raised outside their own country) in this fashion while
the relatively New Labour vote-free zones of rural England are
being flushed away in disinfectant.
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