Monthly Archive for April, 2010

What the web can’t replace

Published on April 27, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: .

While rummaging through Wikipedia the other day I was reminded of a conversation with a colleague of mine. Many years ago his grandfather had bought a full set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and it had become something of a treasured heirloom, passing down through the generations. On rainy afternoons the family would randomly pick a volume and flick through its pages, reading the pencilled comments in the well-thumbed margins, tracking the thoughts and memories of family members now gone.

Somehow I doubt Sidewiki will resonate in quite the same way.

Broadband policies laid bare

Published on April 21, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

The fever is hotting up and with the first televised debate out of the way hopefully the campaign will put personalities aside and start to focus on pledges and policy. With that in mind I thought I’d do a quick skim of the main parties manifestos for any mention of broadband – how might our politicians be squaring up to Peter Cochrane’s comment that we aren’t even in the global 20 counties.

So here goes, in no particular order:

  • Labour have pledged to re-instate the 50p levy on fixed line telephones which will raise around £150-170m per year with a total fund over time of around £1bn specifically targetting the “final third”, with mobile and services for 10% of the population.
  • Conservative is the only party to have published a specific technology ; its a wide-ranging document but perhaps begins with mandating duct and pole sharing, and if the market fails to repsond by 2012 they may retain the Digital Switchover levy on the TV Licence fee to raise around £200m per year, with a total fund over time of perhaps £1.4bn also taregetting areas of market failure. Local authorities will also be given new powers to invest and support local partnerships.
  • Lib Dems want to “support public investment in the roll-out of superfast broadband, targeted first at those areas which are least likely to be provided for by the market“ but give no further details about the types of intervention, the costs, time-scales or what “super fast” means.
  • Scottish Nationalists manifesto took a bit more time to find as their website suggests they hadn’t updated their policies for this election, leaving the 2005 manifesto alone in the list of document. Finally locating it wasn’t much help either – broadband isn’t mentioned once in their 32-page document – bad news for arguably the most digitally excluded region of the UK.
  • Plaid Cymru have said they will “prioritise access to broadband with the aim of providing super-fast broadband to our companies and homes. We will also campaign for compulsory mobile network sharing – giving people across Wales improved mobile coverage.” No costs or specifics are given.
  • UKIP have no mention of broadband or technology in their 16-page manifesto. Since a lot of broadband projects in the UK are at least part funded by the EU it would have been useful to understand how they plan to unlock investment should they win the election and pull the UK out of Europe.
  • The Green Party says it want to ensure “that all have digital access; give BT an obligation to provide affordable high-speed broadband-capable infrastructure to every household.”  No mention of funding so I guess that’s bad news for BT shareholders.
  • The BNP appear not to have released a manifesto for 2010 but since fibre was invented by a Nobel winning Hong Kong immigrant in the UK who has since repatriated himself no doubt they feel their work is done.

Of the main parties, only Conservatives and Labour provide details of how they plan to kick start investment, and choosing between their broadband policies seems to come down to whether your prefer a 50p levy on phone lines and the possibility of a satellite connection in a perhaps more top-down policy (Labour), or a continued levy on the TV licence fee and more local partnerships working together to find solutions (Conservative).

Addendum: Since writing this, the BNP leader, Nick Griffin, has appeared on BBC Newsnight (24 Apr) where he explained to Jeremy Paxman that his party do have a broadband policy. They appreciate that its too expensive for BT to install the fibre optic cables they want us all to have, so they will be using penal servitude – prisoners safe enough not to be sent to their plans for a South Georgia penal colony will be expected to dig the trenches and install the fibre. Glad to offer clarity on this!

I’ll leave it for you to make your own minds up.

Plus ça change

Published on April 21, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Half a decade ago when we last worried and campaigned for access to broadband we were told the panacea for rural areas was going to be .

Since then we have experienced a number of fairly spectacular collapses (remember Aramiska?) and today satellite broadband services are largely back in the margins as something that can truly reach pretty much anywhere with a view of the southern sky, making it appealing to anyone looking for a quick fix, but something not especially welcomed by the people expected to use it.

The reasons people don’t like satellite services hasn’t – can’t – change. It’s not about bandwidth, the cost, that you can’t watch BBC and Sky services – these can be, and are being, fixed. Its latency – a basic law of physics which no scientist or engineer can ever overcome.

Satellite broadband typically uses geostationary satellites which hover 35,863 km above the equator where objects spin at the same rate as the earth so they appear to be stationary in the sky. As we aren’t anywhere near the equator the actual distance is somewhat further, and since the ground station is probably in continental Europe, the return path is also likely to be somewhat further – we live at the end of the hypotenuse of a vast right-angled triangle so its Pythagoras to blame in the first instance.

Even at 300,000,000 metres per second, the speed of light, it will take at least 468ms – half a second – for a single packet of information to be send from a computer to a satellite, back to down earth and for the acknowledgement to be sent back. This is an unbreakable barrier that no amount of engineering or scientific research will be able to break. Blame Einstein for this one.

Why is half a second such a big deal?

  • Interacting at anything less than “natural speed” disrupts interactive creativity. Studies show latency in communications of greater than 100ms disrupt mental agility (Peter Cochrane, “The Delay in Delay”/”Tips for Time Travellers”, 1997)
  • Any application which requires interaction will suffer – games, video conferencing, telephony, office systems like accounting applications, secure systems exchanging encryption keys like VPN’s and e-commerce.

So we can blame the biology of our brains for this final point.

Finding real solutions to the UK’s broadband investment problems isn’t going to go away if we persuade ourselves that satellite technology is really an solution.

There may be a few locations where the right mix of commercial, public and community investment for a real solution is hard to find immediately, so it should be a mark of our collective failure if we have to fall back on satellite services to offer a respite for more than a tiny handful of communities. Lets not fool ourselves, it isn’t here to stay.

50p gone – so what next?

Published on April 7, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

Today (7 April), in the wash-up leading to the , the Government scrapped plans for the 50p levy on all phone lines designed to help fund next generation broadband in the “final third” – those areas of the UK least likely to see traditional commercial investment in telecommunications. I’ve struggled with this for a long time, in two minds about whether it was the right approach – top down centralist model versus more local models.

One thing is clear though – the broadband issue has not gone away. In a recent industry forum it was suggested by experiences gained across Europe that the UK is at least 5 years behind Europe in investing in next generation broadband – this hasn’t changed in a week. And the cause for the Final Third First campaign hasn’t weakened overnight. There is still a very real and urgent need to see investment in telecommunications infrastructure in the UK – and not just in the most difficult to reach areas.

I don’t accept that its realistic to simply wait for the market to wake up to the opportunity – the Caio Review laid out a long list of reasons why this wasn’t likely to happen organically in the UK, and few of these barriers have been overcome since its publication.

While there are clear differences in the approaches of the main political parties leading up to the election, the need for strategic leadership (above public cash) is more important than ever if the UK is to begin to catch up with the European economies we compete with.

If public money isn’t going to be used to see investment unlocked (which I have no issue with) what is going to replace it?

In much of Europe, progress can be put down to strategic leadership. Where public money has been used, its typically invested based on a solid business case – improvement in public services, doing more for less. This was very much the message Sir Peter Gershon championed when he studied the efficiency of public spending. Now he’s as much a Conservative asset the existing Government’s perhaps we may see some movement here from both parties but it would be good to know what we might expect – broadband investment is a long, slow process which needs stability and vision over hype and vagueness.

In the build up to the 2010 Election there is a much needed opportunity to demonstrate the kind of strategic leadership which has seen investment unlocked in many parts of Europe, that a future government understands what is needed to get the UK back on the road to technology leadership – a path we lost some time ago.

Both the Labour Party and the Conservatives have respected senior people who understand this space – Stephen Timms was writing about broadband before most of us had heard of it, and the team of Ed Vaizey and Jeremy Hunt together understand the impact not investing will have on the creative industries and our rural economies. (Ed and a newly elected David Cameron helped community broadband efforts in Oxfordshire the first time around).

The scrapping of the 50p levy isn’t worrying in itself - the lack of a clear vision for the technological future of Britain is. Its not often we get politicians who understand this sector, so please let them tell us what they think that future looks like.

Wow!!

Published on April 5, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been dabbling in systems for a while now, looking at how broadband and social data can be combined to better understand the nature of the digital divide, and to just simply understand what the broadband landscape really looks like.

For broadband information there is only one source of reliable primary data – .

For reliable social data the ONS is pretty good although finding exactly what you want can be a bit of chore  but  with the new data.gov.uk website this is only going to get better.

But at some point you need to combine all this information on a map. The UK and Ireland are fairly unique here in having a service that produces fantastically accurate and useful maps but the down side of this is that for most applications today this level of detail is rarely necessary but and the process is mind bogglingly expensive. The impact has been that I could find perfectly adequate maps of almost anywhere in the world to model my data but for a long time really struggled to find an affordable compromise in the UK.

I then started to use Openstreetmap – an opensource/creative commons mapping project which has through leaps and bounds got better and better. With the entire world held in a database on my machine I’m able to produce perfectly reasonable maps for most of the work I do – except in the most important areas I need to understand – rural areas. Openstreetmap relies on the goodwill of its supporters to trace using GPS the areas it maps – fewer people live in rural areas so naturally less of it is mapped well.

Its felt like the OS have fought to retain their right to charge very large sums to anyone wanting access to their data, regardless of the use and need, so it was with a sense of cynicism I decided to take a peek at the Ordinance Survey’s Opendata website launched last week – the place the OS have released some of their map information to the public.

There is only one word which really captured what I found:

WOW!!

There are geo-coded maps of various scales in glorious detail and superb quality ready to be loaded straight into my tools.

There is a variety of GIS files which provide any number of other locational resources including parliamentary constituency boundaries, councils, the lot.

And there is a file which says where each and every postcode is

So like a child in a sweetshop I delved in, downloading all the files which I’d wanted for so long but had to cobble together from secondary sources – now I had them in the original form from the most respected map makers in the world.

But then a problem – one of the files, the one I really wanted containing postcode data, didn’t download. So I dropped the OS a line expecting an automated reply in a day or two, leading to some perfunctory reply in a few days to say it was really my fault and to try again.

How wrong – within a few minutes I got an apologetic mail from Jamie, one of their developers on their help desk, asking a few sensible questions and we exchanged a few more emails before his shift finished, when I got a new thread from Dr Paul who picked the problem up until it was fixed. It seems a bit of test data in their Goliath system had refused to be flushed from a cache somewhere which given the scale of their launch is a pretty minor problem.

The launch of the data is absolutely fantastic – their support during the launch is something else!

Hats off to the Ordinance Survey – I’m off to do some mapping!

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