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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."
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.