FLAME OVER FIBRE

Dick Pountain/15 March 2001 10:57/Idealog 80

As celebrated superstar columnists go, I think I'm pretty modest - indeed if more columnists were as modest as I am the world would be a better place - and that's the reason I so seldom blow my own trumpet (General MIDI patch 060) concerning the success of my previous predictions. However a leader article in the Guardian this week proved just too provocative for me to take without having a little crow (NB: just a figure of speech, all you animal-rights types). This leader concerned the fate of BT's broadband activities and bore the arresting headline 'Urgent action is needed to stop collapse'. The leader writer went on to point out that the horrendous mess that is BT's ADSL roll-out program has roots that can be traced back to 15 years ago, when Margaret Thatcher's Conservative goverment brutally rebuffed BT's offer to fibre-up the whole of the UK at its own expense.

It so happens that the very first feature I wrote for this magazine back in January 1996 commented on this
stupifyingly destructive decision, and that, remember, was in those dark ages (almost unimaginable now) when Guardian leader writers still thought that computers were only for nerds and would have sniggered at the thought that the word 'broadband' might appear in their columns. Then I wrote 'A question remains over who should pay for such cabling, and this question has become a political football, with the opposing parties backing BT or the (largely American) cable TV companies. BT is not prepared to pay unless it's allowed to profit by becoming a content-provider, the subject of a well-publicised electoral promise by the Labour Party, while the cable TV companies are as yet showing little interest in providing data services'. That was the essence of the matter: BT offered to pay around £20bn of its own money to lay optical fibre to every home in Britain, and that was at a time when, as a hugely successful monopoly it really had those sort of revenue streams available, before the dot.com bubble sapped its vital juices. It wasn't offering this out of the goodness of its heart, for as a quid pro quo it wanted to be allowed to provide content, to become a global multimedia player, a bit like, ooh, let's think, say AOL-Time Warner. And as another business columnist pointed out last week, that £20bn is, by a staggering coincide, exactly the amount of money the government has just taken *out* of the telecomms industry through the cunningly-designed mugging/auction called the 3rd Generation mobile phone licences.

I have never made any secret of my loathing for the vandal Thatcher, and now as the country visibly starts to fall apart around our ears I hope that others may be starting to share it. Working from blind prejudice and an ideological certainty than would shame even a Trotskyist, Thatcher backed the idle, greedy, dumb American cable TV companies to provide for our broadband future, over our own telco which was at that time capable of world-leading technology innovation, merely because the latter had been tainted by being in the public sector. If there are any lessons to be learned from the debacle that is now unfolding as the dot.com boom goes sour, then the most important of them is that the greatest threat to the world lies not in North Korea's imagined military might, nor Saddam's little stash of Sarin, nor even the tentacles of organized crime, but in the almost insane hostility of American business to the state and public sector investment, which has spread faster and further even than BSE or foot-and-mouth disease.

History, if looked at straight, rather than through the whacky spectacles of these market-maniacs, reveals that over and again there arrives a period when the development of civilisation needed a major change of infrastructure: the merchant fleet, the canal, the paved road, the railroad, the sewers, electricity, the international STD telephone system, and in every case the private sector has proved incapable of delivering: it has been the state, under threat of war, or in the grip of some improving philosophy, that has stumped-up, bailed-out and taxed the populace to make it happen.

To be sure, once the initial investment pain has been forgotten, such resources have often been privatised and maybe run more efficiently by the private sector, but private capital will *never* find it sufficient profitable to install world-changing infrastructure without a hefty hand-out/boot-up-the-jacksie from government. And to anyone who says 'but what about the Internet' all I will say is 'ARPA, ARPA, ARPA!'

But Thatcher blew it for us, and now we have to live with whatever feebleness BT (assuming it survives at all) can scrape together. Elsewhere in this issue Tom Arah retails the story of his ADSL experience, which is not so different from that of other Real World editors: the usual delays in installing, the initial delight at its speed and convenience, the gradual souring as everyone else in the neighbourhood signs up, starts to watch movies and Flash animations all day, and the bandwidth starts to sag. The fact of the matter is that using a copper-wired public telephone system as an entertainment distribution medium is a nonsense. Oddly enough, businessmen are not the hungriest bandwidth consumers by a long chalk: kids browsing video-and-music heavy web sites can consume all the bandwidth that exists in this country and then some. As BT once well understood.