What ‘good’ looks like?

I recently let slip that I had been warming to the view that ‘the UK’s broadband experiment has been going pretty well’.  This unnatural show of confidence seemed fully justified when Ofcom subsequently published its European Broadband Scorecard which cheerily claims that: 

“the UK leads the EU’s five biggest economies on most measures of coverage, take-up, usage and choice for both mobile and fixed broadband, and performs well on price”. 

But I should have recognized all this this euphoria as my moment of springtime madness, and I’m grateful to Ian Grant for restoring my sanity by flagging up the highly critical report by Digital Business First (DBF) on ‘The UK’s Enduring Broadband Deficit.  The conclusions of this analysis are indeed pretty damning, for example: 

 “Although the urge to rank the UK as highly as possible is understandable, it appears as though the manner in which Ofcom ranks UK broadband coverage is not credible, nor indeed realistic”. 

Ouch!  On its own terms, the report undoubtedly has much to deride in the UK government’s handling of broadband diffusion but, like the Ofcom report before it, those conclusions depend crucially on the authors’ chosen benchmarks of performance.  For Ofcom, it is the other four major European economies; for DBF, the more relevant metrics lie among Asian economies such as Hong Kong and Korea.  But if international benchmarks are so obviously treacherous, is there a better way of gauging the success of broadband policy? 

That was essentially the question posed to Blair Levin, the eminence grise of the American National Broadband Plan, in an interview last week with the Washington Post.  Levin concurred that international rankings are problematic ‘because they both cherry pick data and are backwards-looking’.  He suggested instead a 4-part test, expressed in typically folksy terms like this: 

“Are you driving fiber deeper?”

“Are you using spectrum more effectively?”

“Are you getting everybody on?”

“And are you using the platforms to deliver public goods more effectively?” 

Through this lens, the Scorecard for UK policy begins to look very different.  It fails miserably on 1 and 2; it does better on 3 but these people are evidently spending most of their time in social networking or home shopping because on 4, expressed in Ofcom’s terms as the ‘Percentage of population who interacted online with public authorities within the last 12 months’, the UK comes a lowly fourth out of five. 

Scepticism fully restored…

Voice from the grave

Who says ‘voice is dead’??  I admit I thought myself that the advent of video conferencing, even at the modest level of Skype video calls to far-flung relatives, had largely undermined the demand for plain old voice telephony.  No doubt it will one day but it seems we’re not there yet.  (I have to admit that the poor quality of most of those Skype calls would be a material issue if they were not free). 

The origin of the technical challenge was really the quality of voice reproduction on mobile phones – poor at the best of times.  Like me, you may have seen that downside as the inevitable cost of mobility but the increasing bandwidth available on modern networks has allowed the handset makers to address the problem.  4G-capable smartphones (and a few 3G handsets) are increasingly being equipped with so-called HD Voice calling, which extends the audio frequency range to something closer to that of the human voice (and also helps to suppress background noise).  The implementation of HD Voice has been frustrated by the obvious compatibility problems:  essentially, both handsets (calling and receiving) and the connecting base station all need to be enabled for HD.  Nonetheless, most of the mobile networks have now introduced this functionality. 

While the mobile networks were the initial focus of HD, I was surprised to see that the technology has also been applied in the fixed sector.  Is that necessary?  Well, if you’ve ever tried to conduct a conference call through a conventional ‘squawk box’, you’ll understand the need for a better solution – particularly if one or more participants is using a mobile phone.  The trick here has been to introduce Dolby noise suppression techniques to improve audio reception.  Dolby also claim that their audio separation technology makes it much easier to distinguish between the voices of speakers at the other end of the call.  Still not convinced?  Then let me refer you to the news that BT is now incorporating this Dolby-enhanced HD technology in its latest generation of conferencing hardware.  

Voice lives on…

A sad reflection

One of my few claims to fame is that I briefly knew Colette Bowe in a previous life – when she was, perhaps, rather less of the ‘grande dame’ of regulation that we know today.  I’ve therefore followed her subsequent career with interest and, now that that she has elected to leave the chairmanship of Ofcom, I wondered whether she might offer us some indiscrete remarks or other obiter dicta about her 5 years with the UK regulator.  No such luck of course but, courtesy of a recent blog by Roger Darlington, I did notice some interesting remarks she made in an interview at the close of the Oxford Media Convention.  In particular, she was asked about the public perception of Ofcom’s role – in the wake of David Cameron’s famous “Bonfire of the Quangos” speech in 2009 (announcing his intention that Ofcom would be stripped of its policy-making function). Colette apparently insisted that: 

  “Policy making is not our job” and that “Ofcom is the keeper of the facts”. 

Oh dear. The first statement may be the unfortunate reality but I didn’t realize that Ofcom’s emasculation had gone as far as the second. Doesn’t bode well for regulatory policy…