Response to THE
NEXT STEPS FOR UK BROADBAND – RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE BROADBAND STAKEHOLDERS
GROUPS, SEPTEMBER 2001
From John Lock, Regional Office,
University of East London
j.f.lock@uel.ac.uk
Richard Steel, Head of
ICT, Newham Council
richard.steel@newham.gov.uk
Richard
Stubbs, Director, Newham Online & Newham.net Ltd
richard.stubbs@newham.org.uk
Introduction
We welcome the publication of this statement and the
accompanying task group reports. In
view of the large gap between the Government’s 2005 target and current
achievement, this consultation is timely.
Our response is in two forms – firstly, specific responses
to the recommendations, then a more general statement. Where we have a recommendation, this is
indicated by use of recommend in the text.
Comments on recommendations (following report
recommendation numbering)
3.1 – We support these.
Newham Online (NeOn) is a working broadplace. Our vision, as set out four years ago, and subsequent delivery is
highly consistent with what is proposed here.
Our experience is that without trialling and proving the
initiatives implied here, it could take significant time to get from IEG-type
statements to functioning local set-ups.
It is going to be easier, in terms of a fast ramp-up of change, to work
with the grain of on-the-ground activity and spread new practice from areas
where there is already the organisational and technological basis of a
broadplace in being.
We therefore recommend that NeOn, and a limited
number of similar initiatives, be adopted as e-laboratories or pathfinders for
the development of broadband-based public and community services, including
education and health – with the rest of the UK following as rapidly as
possible.
We also recommend that these ‘pathfinder broadplaces’
are supported at regional level, eg GLA and LDA in London, and integrated with
Local Strategic Partnerships where these are functioning – to maximise
integration and minimise duplication.
We would be very happy to brief the BSG and/or the e-Envoy
on our experience in Newham. In
summary, the Newham broadplace offers:
- a
local broadband extranet that links the Council, University, colleges and
other bodies that will, through a DfES-funded Wired Communities project,
soon be extended to include the Carpenters Estate with 750 local
households, primary school, college and community buildings.
- the
potential to expand this to up to 20,000 households a) through a similar
planned project in the local New Deal for Communities area, b) through
rewiring Council owned tower and maisonette blocks which can be linked by
point-to-point broadband
- a
portal for Newham at www.newham.net
- every
school connected to the extranet at 2mbps
- the
most ethnically diverse community in the UK with the implicit driver of
transactions across numerous international language and cultural diasporas
- near
co-location with London’s corporate broadband centres in Canary Wharf and
the City and similar proximity to the UK’s centres of ISP business at
Telehouse etc
- a
number of private sector partners
- a
local telecommunications company and ISP constituted as a company limited
by guarantee with responsibility for the management of the extranet, the local portal and delivery of
broadband services.
- experience
of the delivery of interactive broadband services via the TV using two
different delivery channels.
- over
four years’ experience of the challenges of making broadband work in a
collaborative setting involving local government, education (including
both further and higher education), health, voluntary sector and private
sector partners
- projects
under development to build up local content capability, eg professional
media production and education in digital games, computer animation, video
and TV.
3.2 – We think the difficult issues here will be human and
organisational rather than technological.
Guidelines and money aren’t the same as uptake and uptake isn’t by
definition productive – if the initial experience isn’t good, the development
process will stop in its tracks. The
first New Opportunities Fund materials for teachers’ IT training had a
lacklustre reputation because they were not fit for purpose. Many parts of the NHS are a long way off of
a simple transition to broadband-based working – the NHS Plan is vague as to
how IT will contribute practically to health gains.
3.3 – Agreed.
3.4 – In our direct experience, the kinds of initiative
suggested here have a high likelihood of failure because they would appear to
replicate past mistakes, including –
- high
level planning which has no connection with organisational reality on the
ground
- a
view that projects and schemes are a substitute for a sensibly-defined
mainstream-funded longterm approach, ie at least ten years (many SMEs, for
example, are endlessly exasperated by what they experience as
funding-driven random on-off relationships with local education and
training providers and by their consequent treatment as shortterm outputs
not longterm customers)
- failing
to recognise that engaging SMEs, for example, proceeds according to some
simple principles which the funding and policy base of the entire post-16
education system finds very difficult to work with, ie a) work at the pace
of the company, not the course, b) relate to real business needs, not
curricula, c) build up trust over time through investing in local
relationship management, d) differentiate between providing
qualification-based training for individuals and delivering what companies
need to develop.
An alternative might be to research skills development on a
‘what works’ basis via the e-laboratory set ups, with four significant
targets: SMEs, families, public service
organisations, community organisations.
The relevant new Sector Skills Councils might be engaged in this, with
Learning & Skills Councils at the broadplace pathfinder level.
3.5 – Agreed – first bullet. Regarding advice to SMEs, a problem is the acute shortage of on
the ground staff (10 UK Online SME advisers in London?) where our experience
suggests that what works is relationship building, not generalised inputs from
staff driven by quantative contact targets.
The issue here is getting more people into the field who both have real
business backgrounds and solid applied IT expertise.
4.1 – The stress on procurement and infrastructure is correct
in our view (see general comments below)
4.2 - Agreed
4.3 -
We are in favour of these proposals but would like to recommend the
following additions:
Government
should extend significantly the number of premises that can be connected under
the Telecommunications Services Licence from its current limit of 20 premises,
beyond which figure an individual licence is required. At present small local
telecommunications companies face significant costs and administrative burden
and it is understood that these costs are soon to be significantly increased.
Government
should extend significantly the number of premises that can be provided with TV
base services without the need for a local delivery service licence from the
existing limit of 1000 homes.
General comments
Firstly, we strongly agree with a task group comment about
the need for definition regarding broadband.
For reasons set out below, we think ADSL is not broadband because the
defining feature of broadband is personal audio-visual interactivity and the
fact that download speeds are far greater than upload speeds does not support
such use. ADSL should be seen as a product delivery extension of narrowband and
a potentially damaging development cul-de-sac, in particular if its actual
usability persists at the current low level due to contention factors. It is as likely to turn customers off than
on.
We recommend that the report has three flaws which
need addressing.
- We
think the missing dimension to the report is communication. A considerable part of the point is
missed by thinking only about technology and content.
- We
also believe that, though it is essential to pay real heed to industry
views, the voice and interests of the citizen and consumer are
seriously under-weighted.
- We
see that emphasising broadband as being about speed, ‘always-on’ nature
and unmetered access substitutes means for ends.
These three points are inter-related, for the following
reasons.
It is important to start from first principles. Broadband as something which human beings
use is about what can be done and experienced, ie it performs the role of a
technology which is to extend human capability in some way.
The diagram at Annex One illustrates on a broadbrush basis
how individual technologies have been developed which have enabled remote human
communication using increasingly sophisticated combinations of sensory
information. Broadband is a
breakthrough point of convergence, moving us from a separate sequential pattern
of development - write/read, then
speak/hear, then show/see – to a medium through which we can behave
interactively and remotely with each other with almost as much
directly-communicated sensory information as we have face to face.
We believe that broadband will be at least as much a
communication medium as a content purchase medium, including an enormous amount
of personally- and organisationally-generated material. The experience economy will be personally
interactive, not just means to pay for and download goods and services requiring
the functionality of broadband.
This equates to the way predecessor ‘experience
technologies’ have developed, with personal interactive use preceding content,
eg
video – The initial use of VCRs
to timeshift terrestrial TV was far more important than sales or rental of
videotapes. It took a significant
period to move from a ‘view once’ culture fostered by TV, cinema, theatre, etc,
to a ‘view repeatedly’ attitude which makes sales of video (and now DVD) economically
important. Children were probably the
leading edge of that change (and ethnic families buying imported Bollywood or
other product as an alternative to UK TV).
telephony – Mobile phones and
their convergence with the Internet and palmtop devices have created a
marketplace for content using devices whose basic functionality has been around
for a century. The mobile revolution,
generated by a combination of mass, utterly prosaic use (I’m on the train….),
financial innovation (pre-pay) and further innovation in mass use (txt), opened
the door to content by helping create a mass market in handheld communicating
devices.
Internet – Email is the first and
predominant use of the Internet and still the principal practical reason for
being online. Most of the web is still
passive and doesn’t ‘do’ very much besides presenting textual and visual
information.
Radio was an interactive technology before it was a one-way
service medium. The major exception to
interactivity has been TV. This
barrier began, potentially, to break down with the opportunities for
own-generation of material using video.
‘Community TV’ and ‘Reality TV’ can be seen as evidencing erosion of a
production culture whose orientation has always been a one-way version of
producer choice. Interactive TV as a
concept begins to normalise TV as a communications medium. Video-conferencing is our first significant
experience of this.
Broadband opens the door to visual interactivity being a
complete two-way or multi-way process.
It isn’t at all far-fetched to see ‘Personal TV’ as a dominant form of
broadband use. As well as being an
extension of the kind of exhibitionism, for want of a better term, the Internet
has already unleashed (websites generally, webcams notably), it is simply a
real time way to show other people something.
In effect, the capacity of the technology is to let everyone do their
own ‘outside webcasts’. OW is the
audio visual equivalent of email with a photo attachment, ie human beings doing
more of what they do, using the new capacities of cheap consumer
electronics. It’s precisely the
ordinariness of this audio-visual interactivity which promises its mass use by
individuals.
That mundanity is what needs to be explored. For example, if home backing for children’s
education is a critical factor in success, but many parents are either wary of
school or don’t understand what’s required of them, does the interactive
communications capability of broadband offer a route to educational innovation
premised on making new behaviours possible?
We think it does because the opportunity to show people things, from
their children working in the classroom to other other parents helping their
children, comes on stream; and, further, it is family, school and
child-specific, not generalised to an entire society as such programming would
currently be. We have already suggested
that this kind of exercise should be undertaken by the Greater London Authority
to inform its e-London thinking, supporting targeted development of e-laboratories
such as Newham Online to extend thinking further and take this into both public
and private sector R&D processes.
There is a different basis here on which to ramp up
broadband use and one which we recommend is researched and factored
fully into the BSG’s thinking. We also
recommend that much more work needs to be done on potential uses of
broadband, on a basis which proceeds from the principle of ‘innovating out of
daily life to benefit daily life’.
Imagining the specifics of change in thousands of commonplace domestic,
educational, NHS and business transactions is going to be necessary to make
broadplaces work. The experience
economy begins with people, not content.
Three further aspects warrant consideration: the role of TV production, financial
innovation, and public procurement. It
is feasible that there will come a point where terrestrial TV either goes off
air or is broadcast through privately licenced airwaves once it has gone
digital. With sufficient broadband
access to most of the country, TV could equally well all be distributed by
satellite or fibre. Transferring the
BBC into a webcast model, for example, has several effects. Greg Dyke’s ‘one BBC’ becomes a BBC World
Service as product is distributed globally through the Internet. It’s product is distributed in a
non-monopolistic, differently-regulated medium. The licence fee becomes problematic in this context. We recommend that the possible
impacts on broadband take-up of (partial or full) transfer of terrestrial TV to
a broadband environment should be examined with UK broadcasters.
Financial innovation has played a significant part in the
roll out of new communications technologies.
Examples are cheap tickets on the railways (propelled by the Great
Exhibition of 1851), hire purchase and car ownership, and pre-pay for mobile
phones. It may well take an innovation
in relation to broadband to tip the model from ‘high cost-low utility’ to the
reverse.
Unmetered access is negatively attractive, compared to
expensive pay-as-you-go. Telephony has
worked on a PAYG basis for a hundred years.
Adding the characteristics of speed and ‘always on’ don’t transform the
experience of being online, but just make it a bit more convenient. The underlying question of value for money
is related to what people can do. As
the answer is, for many people, not a lot more than I can do with narrowband,
it is going to take more than the report’s unevidenced assertion that
narrowband is a logical jumping off point for broadband to drive take-up. It is going to take personal functionality
(see above) and new functionality, eg online 3D games. Over and above public procurement via
broadplaces, a critical question is how to generate new flows of cash via the
market.
We currently have a range of pre-broadband institutions, but
crucially, these are post-telephony institutions. No telecoms company any longer has a landline based business
model. The last ten years have seen
huge shifts in the shape of the company landscape. The BSG reports refer to the restructuring of BT into retail and
wholesale. It may be that it will take
something like the merger of BT with an international retail bank, linking BT’s
biggest asset – the micro-payment system – to the full range of domestic
financial services, to take broadband out of the arena of expensive flat rate
subscription for limited gain and into use driven payment in high return areas
which are perceived as offering high value for money. It may be possible to ‘give’ broadband access away, just as
mobile phones are, on such a model.
We recommend that the BSG should be talking to major
financial institutions about new business models and different institutional
structures. We also recommend
that Government should avoid developing allegiance to any given company’s fortunes
and concentrate instead on assessing the rate at which business change is
forming business institutions and financial models appropriate to the
post-broadband world. The BSG should
be a changing group, not an emergent cartel!
Public procurement and publicly funded infrastructure were
enormously important market-makers in probably all the key industries of the
last century, eg TV, automotive, pharmaceuticals, defence, aerospace. They were also critical in ensuring that
there was a significant UK presence in global markets in each of these
sectors. The balance of public-private
relationship may have varied by sector and at different times – and may not
always have been optimal! – but that public-private inter-relationship was
crucial. Following from this, another
conclusion from the last century is that industries which had similar growth
potential, but lacked such a driver, succeeded less well by orders of
magnitude, eg film, consumer electronics.
Lord Puttnam, in the debate on
EU-US Trade Relations [House of Lords Hansard, 21 April 1999] said:
The audio-visual
business has for some years been the United States' second largest export
earner. For reasons that I shall attempt to explain, it is almost certainly its
most enduring and most important. The
imbalance of payments between Europe and the United States in this sector now
runs at over 7 billion dollars a year.
At present rates of growth that, in very short order, will undoubtedly
cross the 10 billion dollar mark. From
a European point of view, at some point those numbers become simply
unsustainable. We cannot grow a European economy, create European jobs or any
form of sustainable European future without addressing those issues in a
farsighted and thoroughly comprehensive manner.......
There is
absolutely no doubt that the health of the so-called "creative
industries" - those industries built around intellectual property, of
which film is just one part - will, increasingly, become one of the keys to
success as we enter the information age of the 21st century. That will be an
era in which the global economy will increasingly be driven by two things
-information and images.
In these
circumstances, it should be a matter of the greatest concern that America's
extraordinary dominance in the field of films, television and the moving image
generally continues to intensify. That
concern is heightened by the fact that the Americans are already light years
ahead of us in terms of Internet-based entertainment and information. The
development of the information society, and its potential to increase further
the commercial and cultural domination of the United States, raises the real
prospect of a fundamental dislocation between the world of the imagination,
created and stimulated by the moving image, and the everyday lives of ordinary
people around the globe.
Frankly, we have
no idea what the consequences of such a dislocation might be, for it is
genuinely without any form of social precedent. However, it is surely no exaggeration to say that it has the
potential to be one of the cultural time bombs of the 21st century. The liberating and democratising
possibilities of these new technologies must be realised in order that we all
gain greater access to accurate information and perhaps an increasingly direct
say in the way in which our communities and countries are run.
Broadband is thus an
economic crossroads for the UK. The
success examples cited above - TV, automotive, pharmaceuticals, defence,
aerospace – were all premised on Government’s more or less successful exercise
of a monopolistic/monopsonistic position from creating the BBC to altering the
balance of investment in road/rail to creating the NHS. The failure examples – film, consumer
electronics – are related to the failure of relationship between private
capital, business capacity and mass consumer market. The latter, though, are nearer to what will ultimately make
broadband work as the next systemic technology-enabled economic growth
opportunity.
There is a considerable danger in the roll out of broadband
that, as Lord Puttnam implies, the UK creates its part of a global network
whose market in content is supplied principally by non-UK multinationals and,
say, the UK computer games industry is in relation to this as the UK film industry
is to Hollywood. The only UK content
company of a scale to compete as a market maker with AOL Time Warner or
Bertelsmann or Sony is Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher. All four of these companies also have large
TV interests.
Strategically, we recommend that it is essential that
the BSG takes a view of the likelihood of broadband acting as a means to
accelerate the trade imbalance in the experience economy.
We recommend that major UK broadcasters and content
corporates should be part of the BSG’s development process.
Our view is that, given the mass consumer nature of the roll
out of broadband if it is to be successful, that the UK and the EU face
critical structural difficulties. The
major competitor blocs are Japan and the USA, each of which have a single
language, currency and market. In both
cases, their internal consumer markets have been large and integrated enough to
propel development of experience industry goods and services whereas it is
questionable whether the UK is a large enough market. The logical unit of development may well be the EU for, say, the
computer games industry.
We recommend that a searching look is taken at the
UK’s prospects for market share and what measures may be needed if it is
concluded that there isn’t sufficient company scale and capitalisation to
compete as a global experience industry centre. We recommend that the real expertise and capacity of the
RDAs and higher education to impact on this agenda is scrutinised harshly.
Patterns of public procurement have had very clear spatial
effects, eg supporting growth to the west of central London in pharmaceuticals,
defence, aerospace and TV while accelerating decline to the east by pulling out
of marine defence locations. We also recommend
that the BSG should highlight to Government, strategic planning authorities (NB
London’s Spatial Development Strategy) and the RDAs that this dimension is
factored strategically into national regeneration thinking. [We emphasise that strategic should mean
coherent and long term, in relation to landuse planning, not more short term
projects and schemes.]
