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Can Mobile Broadband Solve the UK Digital Divide?

Posted by samzenpus on from the come-together dept.

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."

5 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. overload by the_denman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    but how many people can it support on a tower at a time before it slows to a crawl?

  2. USO sounds like a really great plan by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:USO sounds like a really great plan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      people need to stop worrying about whether or not something is or is not "socialist", and weight things on their merits, not their labels.

    2. Re:USO sounds like a really great plan by Dhalka226 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That we should disregard what people actually said and slaughter kittens is exactly what I would expect a guy who's really bad at analogies to do.

      Hrm. Yeah, fitting whatever words I want in your mouth is satisfying but ultimately stupid. He never said we should accept any particular idea. He simply said we should be less concerned with the label and more concerned with whether or not it's a good idea. I fail to see how that justifies your attitude, much less your tone of superiority. It's perfectly reasonable.

      So far as "once you start out [. . .] there's no turning back," you'll have to do better than that. That's nothing but a worthless slippery slope argument (no pun intended). If supporting a particular initiative will inevitably lead to the end of our, uh, tulip beds, "trust me, it will" comes nowhere near the mark of evidence, nor of intelligent debate. But then again since you start out slinging insults at somebody for a perverted interpretation of what they said, I would expect little else.

  3. Yes and No by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.