if connected

Today’s government report into the development of the digital economy in Britain is wide ranging. But I’m going to focus on one area, broadband.

There are two key initiatives, plus lots and lots of talk:

A universal service obligation of 2Mbps for all by 2012. An USO for broadband is long overdue. But for those living in rural areas unserved or poorly served today, this speed will prove unsatisfactory. Already, average broadband speeds are over 3Mbps in the UK. By 2012, speeds will have risen again. The best that 2Mbps will do is reduce the height from which people fall when they live outside the peaks of urban broadband excellence. Nothing more. 2Mbps by 2012 is yesterday’s speed tomorrow.

A tax of 50p a month on all fixed line telephones to support rural broadband development. This is controversial and in my view will prove ineffective. The argument in the report is that fibre roll-outs to one third of the UK are uneconomic and this tax will deliver a subsidy that will hasten fibre infrastructure builds nationally. I see several flaws:

1. BT aims to spend £1.5bn to reach 40 percent ish of the population that live in relatively cheap and easy to reach urban areas. By comparison, the total return on £6 per annum for each of the 34m or so fixed telephone lines will not go far given the scale of costs for fibre indicated by BT’s plans.

2. Fibre deployment has barely started in the UK’s cities. BT’s network kicks off early 2010. It’s far too early for anyone to make significant deployments in rural areas where the number of people that would benefit are far less. I suspect either the £6s in tax will stockpile somewhere in the interim, or the monies will be used to support the more modest target of 2Mbps rural broadband (ie the universal service obligation).

3. Given the best will in the world, it will take much time to install fibre networks. Roads must be dug. New equipment must be given to consumers for their homes. New network links must connect exchanges and central offices to central national backhaul infrastructure. It’s inevitable that the initial deployments will be in the cities, even with this additional economic sweetener. And, fibre will take years and years to do.

For the forseeable future, cities will enjoy markedly faster broadband than rural areas. The advent of fibre, regardless of this government initiative, will increase that speed difference. Two tier broadband is coming whether or not this government likes it.

This year I learnt a pile of new things:

At least one hospital cares little about mobile phone use. As my son was being born, a phone rang in the corner of the operating theatre. My other half started blaming me, but the consultant answered her phone so ending the argument.

Hospital walls are too thick for good 3g reception. I spent many a night browsing online with my laptop in a hospital room on mobile broadband, but it kept falling back to 2G.

Some cameraphones really do have good enough cameras. On an increasing number of occasions I have left my real camera at home, instead taking a mobile. I even went to a wedding with just my cameraphone.

Working for a company that is bought by a larger competitor has plus sides. Can’t talk in detail here.

Flash/SSD drives for laptops transform the convenience of using laptops. It’s their quietness as much as their speed that makes them a pleasure to use. Hopefully in 2009 I’ll be saying how much better their reliability is as well. It’s too soon to say now.

TV set-top boxes are becoming louder than PCs. Plus, they crash about as often, based on my experience with a UK pay TV DVR supported by a little Google searching.

Babies can be distracted from using your laptop with a fake keyboard. But only a real mobile phone will satisfy them.

WiFi works better for location finding in cities than GPS. Mobile handset GPS’ have particularly poor reception indoors. Even dedicated GPS units struggle.

Dell’s next day on-site repair is less convenient than a drop off service. Having to wait at home for several days in succession during a repeated failure to repair a PC is a much greater waste of time than using a repair centre.

Earlier this evening I was in the rotating former restaurant many metres above London in BT Tower. Despite having a clear line of sight in all directions and windows that looked like glass, my phone only had a 2G signal. I’m wondering why?

Many companies operate calendar sharing, but the process of setting up a meeting never works as it should. The idea is simple: as people can view each others’ calendars it’s easier to set up meeting times that work for everyone invited. Reality lags:

• No calendar system I’ve seen allows for blocking off travel time before and after meetings. So, a time may look free, but is actually not as a meeting adjacent to free time is off-site somewhere. Or, someone needs time kept free for preparation ahead of a booked meeting.
• Times that are marked ‘busy’, may not be, if there’s a more important meeting being arranged. But the only person that understands which existing meetings are important, and which existing meetings can be shifted around, is a calendar’s owner. The only way for a meeting organiser to find out about this is to ask, on email or phone.
• Shared calendar’s are only up to date if people use them the whole time. So, everyone needs to be connected and in sync via their mobile phone, and needs to be up to date about entering new appointments. At no organisation I’ve worked has this been the case.
• People always seem to become confused over meeting updates in Outlook/Exchange, especially for repeating appointments. Result is that people accidentally delete meeting invites, and recurring meetings therefore disappear from their calendar.
• Network calendars are poor at offering employee privacy. People tend to keep a separate personal calendar on a different system, or, even on pen and paper. So, corporate calendars can’t be relied upon to be the whole truth about someone’s availability.

Shared network calendars just slow down organising meetings by adding extra useless meeting invite steps ahead of the inevitable person to person email exchange.

To speed up performance on my current phone I often switch off the 3G radio to speed up performance.

This is, of course, silly.

The phone is a Windows Mobile device, it’s an operator-branded HTC TyTN (also called ‘Hermes’ or by various operator-specific names).

When the 3G radio is on (WCDMA/UMTS/3GPP), and something is downloading in the background, like a large email attachment, the foreground application often slows down dramatically.

Worse, it’s an unpredictable experience. One minute I’m able to launch the phone application in an instant to call someone, the next, the screen redraws overlap, it starts looking like the phone has crashed although it hasn’t, and the process of making a phone call takes me literally minutes to do.

This is, of course, silly.

In 2G mode, on the same phone with the same software and on the same operator: No problem. In addition, my battery lasts anything from two to four times as long.

This is, of course, silly.

The downside of 2G/GPRS is that data and voice can’t coexist. If I make a phone call, the data connection drops. If there’s a live data connection running, then sometimes incoming calls are bounced direct to my voicemail. It’s all very unsatisfactory and far from “always on”.

With the iPhone, Apple are emphasising that calls do not get missed. They are positioning iPhone with the a message that the one experience that is paramount is the phone/voice one.

For me, the main issue with the absence of a 3G radio on iPhone is not the much vaunted 3G speeds (which are becoming impressive, especially with HSDPA as on my Windows Mobile phone). And, after all, there are plenty of Blackberries in Europe that are only 2G. Instead, the impact of leaving out 3g is the issue of how to ensure voice and data coexist.

Apple will need to implement some neat workarounds — of which a number are possible — to ensure that the lack of 3G does not cause the voice and data experience to conflict. They have to ensure that they deliver on their marketing message that above all else, the iPhone is a great phone as well as everything else.

Intel’s three C’s of the digital home miss the most important one, as Julie Ask pointed out to me over the weekend.
The most important fourth ‘C’ for the digital home is surely ‘Consumer’.
And, on reflection, rather than Intel’s ‘Computing’ or my ‘Productivity’ and ‘Organising’, I would would choose ‘Creativity’.

Intel’s view of the digital home is, as you’d expect, very PC centric with its emphasis on ‘computing’ alongside ‘content’ and ‘communications’ (although ‘productivity’ or ‘organising’ are probably better terms than ‘computing’). Either way, Intel is not neglecting content. Intel are partnering with Bertelsmann to make it easier to deliver music, films and games via the Internet to the digital home.

“One of the major environmental changes in the electronics industry is this convergence — a combination of computing, communications and content,” Intel Chief Executive Craig Barrett told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. “This thing we call the digital home really is the combination of all three of those things.”