Not neutrality

One of the surprises for me in the whole Snowden/surveillance/data security controversy is that, relatively speaking, it hasn’t created more angst on this side of the Atlantic. Perhaps for similar reasons, the net neutrality debate appears not to have engendered the same levels of outrage within the UK’s business and civil liberties camps. For my own part, I’ve resisted commenting over the past year or more because there seemed little new to add, given that the two factions were merely reiterating their already entrenched positions. But there was some real news earlier this month and I couldn’t resist commenting on some of the coverage. 

On 14^th January, a U.S. Court struck down the most recent attempt by the FCC to enforce net neutrality rules – its so-called Open Internet Order. The court found that parts of these regulations violated the Communications Act's clear prohibition on imposing common carriage requirements on networks like the Internet. 

While many would argue that the court ruling actually propels the FCC towards a more sensible regulatory approach, several long-time champions of net neutrality reacted angrily.  For example, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, wrote an article for the next day’s edition of The New Yorker entitled ‘Closing Time for the Open Internet’.  He wrote:

“Acting together, the Internet service providers could destroy Netflix by slowing its data to a crawl, making movies impossible to watch”.

The next week, another publication,The Register, reported as follows:

“Netflix – which has roughly 40 million subscribers globally – yesterday warned its investors (and the wider world) that cable companies and other ISPs could arbitrarily strangle access to online video sites or block them entirely unless, say, said websites coughed up some cash. If this were to happen, Netflix vowed it would unleash hell”. 

 So, a justifiable declaration of war by Netflix?  Well, not quite… The Netflix ‘warning to investors’ was contained in that week’s letter to shareholders by senior management.  This goes on to say:

“The most likely case, however, is that ISPs will avoid this consumer-unfriendly path of discrimination… ISPs are generally aware of the broad public support for net neutrality and don’t want to galvanize government action… Moreover, ISPs have very profitable broadband businesses they want to expand. Consumers purchase higher bandwidth packages mostly for one reason: high-quality streaming video”. 

Precisely, and the same point is actually reiterated later in the Tim Wu article:

“These days, Internet firms like Google and Facebook are so powerful that they could decide to turn around and demand that Internet providers pay them for the right to access their sites. This is the norm in cable television.” 

To my mind, the net neutrality debate might finally have become interesting!

 

Distance is dead: long live distance!

‘Christmas is a time for families’ goes the saying, and, like many parents, I was again grateful this year that Skype made it possible for me to see and talk to my far-flung children over the festive season.  OK there was a bit of delay in speech now and then but, when a call to the other side of the world is totally free, who’s complaining about quality of service? 

In fact, being aware of the fast broadband connections in use at the far end, I had always assumed that any problems in call quality arose simply because of the limited DSL service available from BT in my home village.  However, a recent article in the US publication, Techpolicy Daily, has shed more light on this.  The article explains that even digital transmission of data requires the signal to be boosted periodically along the length of the transmission line.  Each such boost imposes a miniscule delay and, the more boosts, the greater the travel time impediment.  This cumulative deterioration in latency is independent of any delays resulting from local access speeds.  In other words: 

“Even if all users access the internet over connections offering the same speed, data will take longer to reach those located more distant from its origin”. 

Does this matter?  Perhaps not in the case of my Skype calls but, as the article goes on to explain, it could have a bearing on the uptake of centralized data repositories, such as those needed for cloud computing, particularly in physically distant and less densely-populated locations like New Zealand.  

Oops!  It’s another digital divide…

Me and my shadow

I don’t often write about the negative impacts of ‘the wired world’ but I’ve recently been prompted to do so by my preparations for Christmas.  As is well known, Britain is the biggest online shopping nation in the developed world, with almost two-thirds of adults using the internet to buy goods or services.  I have followed that fine tradition by doing all my Christmas shopping on-line, and I’ve been very happy with my purchases, but what has made me less happy is the visible ‘audit trail’ that these transactions have left.  Every time I log on to a well-known electronic retailer, I am presented with pictorial information on the items I have purchased, the items I might have purchased - and the items my wife bought.  So much for surprises! 

Now, I realize that the audit trails should probably be seen as a benign and inevitable part of the on-line experience, and I’m told that there are ways to disguise buying information, but the experience got me thinking about other ways an on-line presence could easily become intrusive.  The hazards of social media are well understood but what about the prospective ‘internet of things?  Do I really want someone (or something) else to know where I go with my smartphone or what time I go to bed…? 

This is essentially a network security and surveillance problem.  I don’t have the technical expertise to suggest its resolution but I’m glad to see that better-equipped people – such as Glyn Moody – are starting to worry about the same issue.  I wonder if he could advise on Santa’s Dilemma…?  

‘Tis the season for giving

Whoa, can this be true?  Yet more money for broadband infrastructure?  OK, the latest (Autumn Statement) gift from the government - £10m for a ‘competitive fund’ to address coverage in remote rural areas – was really pretty modest, but just consider the investment already made: £530m for the original BDUK endowment; a further £250 allocated from the 2013 spending round; £150m for ‘Super-connected Cities’ (still- born but the subsequent voucher scheme is valuable nonetheless); £150m for improved mobile coverage etc. etc.  It all adds up to a tidy sum, and one nicely garnished with the latest upbeat opinions of research firm Point Topic: 

“95% [superfast coverage] by 2017 should certainly be achievable and is also desirable…In fact, with the inclusion of FWA, mobile and satellite in the metrics, the targets can in some senses said to have already been achieved” 

So, notwithstanding some recurring criticism of BT’s commercial tactics, the UK broadband outlook appears remarkably encouraging - and showing signs that the government’s drip-feed of subsidies is beginning to pay off. Enjoy the moment!  

It’s a pity, therefore, that some new research from the US shows Europe’s broadband investment is actually falling well behind.  Based on detailed CAPEX data compiled by Infonetics, Roslyn Layton of Aalborg University in Copenhagen has compared recent broadband investment levels in the US with that of the aggregate spend by the 27 EU states. Her results are summarized below.

	2011 CAPEX billions	2012 CAPEX billions	YoY Change	2011 Population millions	2011 $/pers	2012 Population millions	2012 $/pers
US	$72.4	$77.6	7%	311.6	$232	313.9	$247
EU27	$63.4	$50.3	-21%	501.9	$126	500.0	$100

As the table shows, Europe’s per capita investment in 2011 was already little more than half that of the US; worse, the 7% downturn in the EU’s spending last year meant that it was spending only 40 cents on broadband equipment for every dollar invested in the US.   

Now, there is clearly a ‘political’ agenda behind this research, and one might question whether the apparently superior US investment has resulted in such a vibrant broadband market, but it seems fair to conclude that any “best in Europe” claim by the UK might actually amount to a rather hollow victory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Too important to fail

Writing quite recently about demand in the US for ‘gigabit networks’, I reported one very credible view that the phenomenon reflects recognition of our growing reliance on the internet for all manner of infrastructure and services.  The proponent in question went on to explain: “that reliance is only going to increase and people will continue to want faster and faster broadband speeds for peace of mind.”  That begins to sound like an unhealthy spiral of addiction but is our growing dependence on communication networks (perversely) a ‘good thing’?  Well, it might be…

Earlier this month, a US court ruled that the Department of Homeland Security must make a plan to shut off the internet and mobile communications available to the American public. While President Obama quickly condemned former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for turning off the internet in his country to quell widespread civil disobedience in 2011, the US government apparently has the authority to do much the same thing - under a plan devised during the Bush administration. Details of the controversial "kill switch" authority have been classified but thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), DHS is obliged to reveal these within the next few months. 

Even assuming President Obama (or David Cameron) wanted to invoke such a measure, would it actually work?  Happily, the expert view seems to be that activating any kind of kill switch would do more harm than good.  According to Harold Feld, Vice President at Public Knowledge, a US lobby group focused on communications and technology policy, "I find it hard to imagine why an internet kill switch would ever be a good idea, short of some science fiction scenario wherein the network comes alive à la Terminator/Skynet.  At this point, so much of our critical infrastructure runs on the internet that a 'kill switch' would do more harm than anything short of a nuclear strike.  It would be like cutting off our own head to escape someone pulling our hair”.  A very similar argument is thought to apply to disabling mobile phones. The benefit of people being able to communicate on their cellphones in times of crisis is enormous, and cutting that off would potentially be very dangerous.  

At a time of growing concern about government security and surveillance issues, it’s heartening to find that the ubiquity of modern communications networks might actually be proof against ‘big brother’ measures.

Hail, the new economic wonder drug!

Well aware of the sundry benefits of faster broadband (not least the vastly improved performance of i-player!) I was fascinated to read recently that it’s also just the thing to supercharge economic growth.  According to analysis commissioned by DCMS from a consortium led by SQW (with Cambridge Econometrics and Dr Pantelis Koutroumpis), government interventions to upgrade broadband connectivity are projected to return approximately ‘£20 in net economic impact for every £1 of public investment’.  Wow!    

Unsurprisingly, I was not alone in feeling a tad sceptical about this conclusion: 

“Basically, BDUK has been getting a lot of flak and bad press…so the DCMS thought they best pay someone to write a nice report bigging up how much its broadband investment is going to bolster the economy”. (Computer Weekly) 

“The government, perhaps keen to cut through all the negative press, commissioned its UK Broadband Impact Study  in what appears to be a vain attempt to search for some good news about BDUK”. (The Register)

Within the Report itself, however, SQW appear to be refreshingly honest about its findings: 

“While recognising that there are still gaps in the empirical evidence base, and that the future is inherently uncertain, the study’s projections are the outputs from a rigorous and detailed analysis which draws on the best data currently available”. 

I was intrigued by that phrase, the ‘gaps in the empirical evidence base’, but it seems to stem largely from the Report’s later admission that: “The productivity impacts of increased speeds are, as yet, highly uncertain.” In fact, given the relatively recent introduction of high-speed broadband, SQW have had to invoke a labyrinth of tortuous logic and heroic assumptions to arrive at their central conclusion that: ‘an increase of 100% in the used speed in a year will lead to a 0.3% uplift in productivity  over the following three year period’. 

This sounds like a risky finding but, guess what…?

 “It also aligns…with research by Chalmers University of Technology, which found that a doubling of speed in OECD countries is associated with a 0.3 percentage point increase in GDP growth”.  What a coincidence!   

It turns out that the ‘research’ in question by Chalmers University (who??) consists of an econometric analysis of the past relationship between broadband speed and GDP growth in a sample of OECD countries.  A closer look at that analysis reveals this cautionary note from the authors: 

“This study concludes that the hypothetical impact of broadband speed on economic growth is statistically significant…. As the impact is modelled as linear, it needs to be judiciously applied when hypothetical country growth is far away from the sample means. The hypothetical impact is based on an elasticity measurement and any forward-looking simulation should be applied with care “. 

In other words, the past relationship established for this data set may not apply in the future for a different group…. As expected, therefore, take the ‘good news’ from DCMS with a pinch of salt.

Of broadband cats and pigeons

My goodness, what a flurry of feathers.… The Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) set out to conduct a perfectly sensible exercise, looking at the key statistical determinants of bandwidth requirement and how these determinants might change over the next ten years. Quite properly, they described this as “a model for forecasting bandwidth demand” but that choice of words may have been responsible for the subsequent furore and howls of protest when the ‘average demand’ turned out to be surprisingly low (19 Mbps).  For example, the FT reported that:

“A key government advisory group will raise questions over whether most homes in the UK are likely to need superfast broadband in 10 years’ time”.

Similarly, Sean Royce of Kingston Communications (KC) is reported as describing the BSG result as a 'red herring' that the Government might use as a ‘yard stick’ to help lower the bar for its own superfast broadband targets. 

The BSG has rightly defended its statistical results, and neither of the above policy claims would be justified, but I’m bound to agree with a further aspect of the criticism from Sean Royce, i.e.

“The second concern I have with the study is need versus desire. From our experience, there is a clear distinction between the broadband capacity that households need and the speed levels that consumers want. This isn’t simply about keeping up with the Jones’. It’s a recognition that…we [already] rely on the internet. That reliance is only going to increase and people will continue to want faster and faster broadband speeds for peace of mind.” 

Anyone in any doubt about the importance of broadband ‘aspiration’ need only consider the eruption in US demand for Gigabit capacity – probably sparked off by the pioneering deployment of Google fibre networks.  There is no shortage of editorial advice that ‘nobody needs gigabit capacity (yet!)’ but that hasn’t stopped the emergence of so-called gigabit envy.  The latest metropolitan examples are in Los Angeles and Las Vegas but there are now dozens of US cities planning Gigabit networks.  And the rhetoric isn’t confined to city mayors: earlier this year,

Julius Genachowski, then Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote an article entitled, ‘Why the U.S. Needs Gigabit Communities’.  It argued:

“We’re in a global bandwidth race, and we need to ensure the U.S. has a strategic bandwidth advantage. Without it, we risk losing our global lead on innovation, and we risk watching jobs and investment flow elsewhere….”

So much for the determinants of demand…