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Can Mobile Broadband Solve the UK Digital Divide?
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."
but how many people can it support on a tower at a time before it slows to a crawl?
Yes, it may be a little socialist in some respects, it really forces a good thing onto the people with very little downside except short term funding issues.
If you think that short term funding issues should take precedence over long term societal growth, then by all means reject this proposal. But it should be noted that that sort of short term thinking is what led to the collapse of the American auto industry and the subsequent begging for bailouts.
It is forward looking policies that brought Korea and Japan to the forefront of broadband technology. With every new home wired for fiber and existing lines being replaced at a rate of 3 miles per hour, these Asian countries have already made investments that Western countries should have been making 10 years ago when the DotCom boom was in full effect and money was plentiful.
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.
No, in the sense that the technology is severely limited compared to a hardline.
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.
And so ends another edition of "Easy Answers to Easy Questions".
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
where is everyone?
Brought to you by Physics Phil, deep in the 1060 dungeon.
now on topic.
Dumb idea
We (Western nations) should just bite the bullet and install fibre. The theoretical limit of data transfer over fibre is far in excess of what we can reach now, so a good fibre network would serve the country for decades.
Wireless is a cheap cop-out. It'll always be slower than fibre.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Hand up everyone who is sick and tired of hearing about "digital divide". Anyone who would rather have a fifth of whiskey is not very likely to make much use of the free broadband. We are not talking about equatorial Africa, we are talking about western world. No one faces a choice of "starvation or Internet". There are so many other, more serious deprivations that people can face, that this obsession with providing free Internet access smacks of elitism.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Does it seem strange to anyone else that the UK should on one hand wish to make broadband internet ubiquitous, while on the other hand wish to monitor internet traffic so closely?
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
That would require substantial investment from network operators in 3G/4G base stations as the vast majority of rural mobile(cellular) base stations are still 2G with very limiting data rates. Network operators upgraded their urban network (with new 3G base stations) from 2G to 3G to cover the majority of the population (and maximise their revenue - roi) but they are very slow to upgrade their rural network as this brings less return on investment. And it's the rural areas which might not have access to fixed-line broadband. So, both fixed-line adn mobile network operators need to pay for network expansion and provision. Who will motivate/force them to do so? Ofcom? (the UK telecomms regulator)
I'm on the 3 Mobile Broadband service in the UK. Skype, Gizmo and other VoIP services are NOT blocked.
What?!?
I use a 3G HSDPA service regularly with two different laptops that have built-in HSDPA modems from Sierra Wireless and Ericsson. I also use Nokia and LG phones over Bluetooth tethering (since I'm in Australia and have sensible carriers that don't lock that down).
I get a public IP address. No NAT. No filtering, either. Full use of VoIP (SIP or *ick* Skype), etc. No dodgy proxy hacks with image compression or other nasties. It's just a regularly IP service.
It's fast. Not ADSL2+-over-wifi fast, but quite fast enough for everything I need to do, including VNC/RDP remote control of machines at work, SSH, etc. Latency is occasionally a wee bit high, but nothing too bad.
It's pretty stable - it only goes a bit flakey when going through (eg) a train tunnel where it completely loses reception. Even then, it often just transparently recovers without apps or the OS ever really noticing. Sitting in one place, it's rock solid.
I use VoIP via my 3G service in my laptop regularly, via both SIP and (when forced, reluctantly) Skype. It's pretty darn solid; the only issues are VERY occasional quality drops due to latency spikes.
With a 1GB per month data allowance (for a wallet-smashing $15 per month ... so, about the price of a decent lunch) I can get a lot done. My carrier, Three (Hutchison), is the best priced data carrier in Australia, but Vodafone and Optus aren't too much worse and they have much better coverage, so this is hardly unique.
So ... if your 3G service sucks, it's because your carrier sucks, not because the technology does. Unfortunately, it looks like carriers DO suck in the US and the UK, though for different reasons.
In the US, you get hardware you've bought and paid for but is locked down so hard you can barely breathe next to it. Want to install your own apps? Better pay to unlock that feature. Want to use bluetooth/wifi tethering? Better get the "Internet" plan to unlock that feature. Want to use another provider's SIM with *YOUR* hardware, even after your contract has expired? Tough luck.
In the UK, it doesn't seem to be so much locked down as crap. Blocked and filtered up the wazoo, WAP-like transparent proxying and HTML/image reprocessing, private IPs handed out with all traffic through proxies or NAT, etc. Ick.
This will have to change ... but it's a carrier problem not a technology one.
My girlfriend has mobile broadband through Vodafone because BT couldn't figure out how to install a line in her property (which didn't stop an engineer claiming he'd done it, and them billing her for most of a year before it all got sorted out - but I digress).
I've been surprised at how good the speed and stability of her connection is, but the traffic cap is crippling. She's a fairly heavy 'net user (she's a freelance web designer, so has to upload new sites and drafts for her clients to see), but she's not a filesharer, and she runs up against her 5GB cap most months. Going over it gets very expensive very quickly.
The worst thing about the cap is that it discourages her from downloading updates for her OS and software... meaning that she's probably more open to virus/worm infections.
Police State UK - news and
> The technology has all sorts of problems...
The number one problem being that in order to have some of the other problems described all traffic must be going through proxies, leaving users vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
But I suppose the government might consider that a feature.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
Mandatory? WTF? I'm sure they are planning on following this up with 1.5 way vidscreens that you can't turn off, only turn down?
There is a war going on for your mind.
Citation needed? There aren't many places I can't get a UMTS signal (on the train along the south coast of Wales there are a few places where it drops out, but not many), but I can get as fast a connection via my phone when I visit my mother (North Devon) as I can through her ADSL line. UMTS seems to provide pretty good coverage, and most networks are slowly deploying HSPA. Of course they are going for urban areas first, just as they did with GPRS and UMTS, to pay for deployments elsewhere, but GPRS seems to be ubiquitous and UMTS pretty close behind now...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I was somewhat of a geek in high school back in the 1970's, and one part of George Orwell's 1984 struck me as extremely unlikely, verging on impossible -- that the television (some kind of flat screen bolted to the wall, as I recall) that every citizen was required to have would also double as a surveillance device, giving Big Brother (that term seems so quaint these days) the opportunity to keep tabs on the rank and file. I thought, even if you could mass-produce the hardware at some reasonable cost (bear in mind this was 1972), there's just not enough bandwidth in the world to accomplish this.
Well, now there is. And the first step of such a system would be to insure that the infrastructure was in place.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Doushite uso tsuku?
I recently moved to a farm in North Yorkshire. My closest telephone exchange is just over 2 miles away, fibre is non-existent and mobiles only work on *some* networks, and even then only right up against the windows on the east side of the house. When mobiles do work, you might get GSM if you are really lucky. Population density is under 1 farm per km^2.
Local TE is not LLU and only has BT's kit in it, so operators like Be aren't.
I took the plunge and got PlusNet, who promised me that I would get something like 2Mbps given the limitations, which sounded fine- it's all Virgin gave me over fibre at my previous urban address.
PlusNet have actually managed to give me over 5.5Mbps, which I am completely blown away by. I don't actually understand how they've done it, though I guess contention is quite low. And that's by BT speedtest, not router numbers (which are predictably higher)
Back O/T - If I had to rely on 3G out here I'd be screwed. There isn't any, and it would be hard to make a business case for it. It's also an AONB designated region of the moors, so building a mast would be almost impossible anyway. Sure 5-6Mbps sucks compared to 50odd in the Korean sticks if that's what they can have, but it's a much better picture than some would have you believe. If only I could get digital radio...
Network operators didn't concentrate on urban areas to maximise return although i bet they don't complain about that.
The 3G licences they bought had set-in-stone targets for % of population covered my a fixed date or they would be revoked. This is why cities got hit first and then the rest. Now it doesn't matter anymore apart from for business reasons, but they spent foolish amounts of money growing fast for a few years so may want to take it easy for a bit. 3G is generally held to have been a bit of a white elephant, but that may have more to do with the way it is marketed.
Finally, if you rock up to any picturesque village and start setting up for a LOS survey to try to find a workable mast location I'll give you evens that some wit will come and ask what you're doing up a cherry picker with maps,binoculars and cameras and then whip out a pristine Nokia 5210 or similar and proclaim that new masts are baby-boiling/brain-melting/cancer-causing/radioactive(!) and obviously not needed as they have a signal...
In the majority of cases local residents' protest groups and council planning departments are far more to blame than the operators if mobile networks are non-existent/limited/suck in a given area of the UK...