The faster the better - the truth about Broadband

Broadband is this year's buzzword. You hear it everywhere but you may have been puzzled by the advertisements for it. Why on earth would anyone in their right mind pay £30 a month for something so vague? Even the advertisers seem unable to describe it!

BT shows a burst pipe under the road. Confused? You have every right to be. What on earth are they describing? And what do you get for your money? The ad certainly doesn't tell you. AOL tries a different approach. "You can download music and film previews", they say. How that must fail to excite you! You don't get the films themselves, just previews of products they'll no doubt try to sell you later. They must be mad.

The whole thing seems to beggar belief but don't go away. Broadband really does carry enormous hidden promise and the clue is also there in the advertisements. "You'll be able to surf the net up to ten times faster," they say. It doesn't sound much but it really is important.

Doing things faster or doing different things?
Do you remember the early computers? You could word process on them but your screen was black with white writing. Many people said typewriters were better and who could blame them? Then, when computers became faster they said, "I can't type any faster," but they'd missed the point. The speed didn't help them do the same things faster, it allowed them to do new things.

First came real typefaces and your written work looked as if you'd taken it to a printer - but at a fraction of the cost. Few people saw this coming, but they loved it when it arrived.

Then came desk-top publishing with graphics and colour. Suddenly you could produce real newsletters and magazines. Again, few foresaw its arrival - but they loved it when it came.

Then came digital photography and CD-quality music. Who would have foreseen digital photographs of new babies emailed instantly to loving grandparents in foreign lands? Or teenagers exchanging music globally and putting the music industry into a spin?

Currently, digital video is offering exciting opportunities in schools and homes. What will people be doing with it in a couple of years' time? Can you honestly guess? Hindsight is a wonderful thing but can you look into the future and see what's coming next?

Each one of these became possible because of increased computer speed. The speed didn't make us do things faster - it opened new doors.

And this is the hidden secret behind broadband. The increased speed of your Internet connection will open new doors but no-one can second guess what they will reveal - and that includes the people selling broadband! So at the moment they are describing the same old things and telling us how much faster we'll be able to do them. And no-one is impressed! What a surprise.

A clue from history
There is one clue that we can find in history. It happened in France just a few years before the Internet arrived. The French telephone company decided not to print a paper phone book. Instead they gave everyone a small screen called a "Minitel" connected to their phone line. It was used to look up telephone numbers and it worked well.

What no-one seems to have foreseen was the potential for other uses. It appears obvious in retrospect. Soon, nearly every French town had a set of teletext-style pages and people were booking theatre tickets and making travel arrangements using their Minitel screens. At its height over 30,000 services were available. Talk about e-commerce - the French were doing it before Tony Blair had even heard of it!

The important thing about Minitel is that the e-commerce was an unexpected consequence and this is the truth behind broadband. It will do things we can't yet think of. Within a year or so, once a critical mass has built up, new services and products that we can't imagine will be available and a person without broadband will be as unusual as a person without electricity.

Should I get gas or electricity?
Indeed, that's an excellent analogy to end on. Back at the turn of the last century, gas and electricity were being installed in New York. People thought they didn't need both and the general consensus of opinion was that you should get gas "because electricity doesn't do much". Gas would cook, heat your home, provide light, etc. Electricity didn't seem to do much. At the time it was completely impossible for those early New Yorkers foresee the invention of fridges, freezers, radio, television, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, mood lighting, burglar alarms, etc.

Now consider how inconvenienced we are when there's a power cut!

Broadband is going to be like this. We currently have water, gas and electricity piped into our homes. Soon there will be a fourth service - an information "pipe" - and we'll do things with it that we simply can't imagine yet. And we'll undoubtedly be just as inconvenienced when there's a service cut.

This is what BT was trying to describe in its advertisement. The multimedia elements pouring out of the leaking pipe were their way of trying to excite us about all the stuff we're going to get but which we can't yet imagine because it hasn't been invented yet! Their advertisement didn't excite, but broadband should. It's essential to get it rolled out, including rural areas and let the future begin. Why wait for the rest of the world to get there first.