Broadband

By now there can be hardly a television viewer who hasn't heard of broadband yet, despite the advertisements, the reaction of most people is "I don't need it". It's an understandable reaction. Those who are old enough will remember hearing it about radio. A later generation said it of television. Yet who could have imagined, as Granddad twiddled his crystal set to hear the news in his ear, that one day we would be surrounded by stereophonic sounds and colour images in our homes and in our cars?

Every time a new technology comes along there are a few early adopters at one end of the scale, a few real Luddites at the other, and the great majority who simply see no need for it in its early years but later find it an indispensable part of their lives without really noticing when the change happened. Broadband is just the same. It's the latest in a series of technologies whose advance is unstoppable and whose impact on mankind is profound. First there was printing, then telephony, and television. Now broadband. And the government has two choices, either encourage and promote it or allow other countries to steal a march on us by pushing ahead with greater vigour.

The reason behind the "I don't need it" argument is easy to understand. At first every new technology seems to do very little and broadband is no different. It doesn't seem to do much right now. The amazing thing is that neither did previous technologies. Printing produced more copies - so what? Radio added sound and television added moving pictures but neither seemed life-changing. Yet their effects were far wider than anyone could have foreseen. To prove it, just consider whether you would go back to an earlier age and try living without these technologies? Think carefully before you answer. You wouldn't so much be giving up modern technology, you'd be giving up the wider fruits of its introduction. You'd be entering a world of bigotry and superstition where you had a fair chance of being burnt, or at least starve, if you believed the wrong thing or were simply unlucky.

At the moment there are three places where you might meet broadband - at home, at school and at work - although for teachers, the last two tend to be one and the same). At home you may have gone over to broadband or be considering it - but only if you live in a fairly urban area where it's commercially viable to run cables or upgrade BT telephones exchanges. For vast areas of the UK this will not happen and the advertisements are a constant taunt, dangling a carrot that you can't have in front of your eyes. At work, your IT network may have been converted to broadband and you may not even realise it. At school, you probably know if it has arrived and if not, when it is due to be installed. Tony Blair has declared that every school will be on broadband by 2006 and many schools are already connected.

So what are the early signs of the effect of broadband in school? Do children surf the Net ten times faster and does it make them learn ten times quicker? Well, as you might expect, the answer has little to do with speed and more to do with the unexpected. It turns out that it's not the speed that is the main benefit (though this is a handy consequence) it's the fact that it's more reliable - so much so that it actually becomes usable - often for the first time! Teachers in schools without broadband might prepare a lesson that uses the Internet, but it only takes a couple of occasions when the connection can't be made or web sites trickle in at mind-numbing slowness, for them to give up any pretence at regarding the Internet as a useful educational resource.

Once broadband arrives, teachers find that it's reliable. It always works. You click and it's there. And when the children access a website that you've selected for them it does appear and in a reasonable time. What broadband does is make the Internet usable. And once that happens there'll be no stopping us. Imagine having reliable, always-on, fast Internet access. What will we do with it?

Well the first thing is that an activity like Net Detectives (which was described in Issue 7) will leap to life as children see moving CCTV images or the "live" scene from the police helicopter as they attempt to solve a crime.

The second thing is that you could invite guest speakers into your lessons with ease and frequency. "What was life like during WW2 rationing? Let's ask Lauren's great grandfather, Mr Ralph Smith. He was there and he still has his ration book. Now let's have a quick word with Mr Sharpe at the local museum and see if he can answer Jack's question about gas masks". Reliable video-conferencing with the community should be a piece of cake, especially since your parents will have their half of the technology in their living rooms as part of their own home broadband access.

The real question is how will you adapt your lessons to make full use of it?

And speaking of broadband at home, you'll probably want to have a quick peek at Delia's website whilst cooking or at Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen's whilst decorating. You won't need to stop what you're doing any more than you do when you look in a book. In fact, on the subject of cooking, your fridge may already have checked for you and have ideas for your evening meal based on what you have in stock.

You see, broadband won't just be on computers. It will be endemic in everyday life. Technologies like bluetooth will bring broadband to every appliance and gadget you own. Your fridge, your car, your mobile phone, will all be connected and once the critical mass is reached it will happen quite quickly. Look at how the Internet has changed in just a few years from being the preserve of a few techno-enthusiasts to the place where over £1 billion of purchases were made last year by ordinary people. Would you have foreseen the ease with which you can buy an Easyjet flight, five years ago? Now consider what we might be doing in five years time?

A television programme, that you've been immersed in, will simply continue after the broadcast if you wish it to, with deeper information, extra activities and live interaction with the creators and presenters. It's already happening in a small way with references to web sites you can visit after the programme. Imagine how they will use this facility when broadband access is there in the background on everyone's TV and needs only a press of the remote to access it.

Your car (which, by the way, never gets lost) will instantly translate that obscure foreign road sign for you as you approach it. No danger of getting a ticket because you didn't understand. And on your return home it will switch on the heating and the TV as you approach.

These things are just the very obvious things that easily spring to mind as you speculate on what might happen. As with all technologies the reality will be beyond our imaginings and will take us in directions we never expected.

But here's one final thought that may not have occurred to you yet.

We filter Internet access in schools so that our children are protected from the rare but very real dangers and we advise parents to be involved in their Internet use and not restrict it to unsupervised use in the bedroom. How, in the words of Alan November, "will we protect children when they have always-on, fast Internet access in their pockets on a toy?" We can protect them in the computer suite. How do we protect them in the playground?