Last year’s editorial ‘Fibre delivers much more than faster connections’ has been a popular download but, on reflection, in the light of recent research and the interim Digital Britain report, it did not deliver clear enough messages. 

When those of us who enthuse about innovation complain that people, particularly those in positions of authority and influence, “just don’t get it” we are in effect admitting that we have failed to explain the new concepts with sufficient clarity and persuasive force.   

Often we have to step back from urgent pleading, to let the passage of time reveal the sense of the case for investment in the future and to simply accept the loss of opportunity during this wider learning process.  Innovators, like comedians, have to learn the value of good timing. 

Anyone who has ever tried launching new ideas inside a large organisation will understand that threats, impending risks, usually get more air-time than opportunities and promises.   It’s much the same with public policy.  It is so often the case that until ‘the the disaster waiting to happen’ has actually happened that the penny finally drops and the media-led blame brigade get off on another rush of hind-sight-polished, nose-in-the-air, 'I told you so' crowing – and engineers, like Harrison’s guitar lament, gently weep.

The basic point of the earlier editorial was to plead for a broader understanding of how replacing copper with fibre and managing these new access networks differently  could make a real difference to the service experience.   Hence the central theme that it would be good to look beyond the headline download speeds of the last generation asymmetric design that presumed that it was better to receive than to give.

In truth there never was such perverse design principle – merely a massive design compromise forced by the inadequacies of an ancient and increasingly irrelevant technology and a desire to extract as much profit before admitting to the need for any apple-cart-upsetting new investment.

Banks got into a similar mess by continuing to stretch their money extraction from diminishing real assets – over-valuing the intrinsic value of the property base in much the same way as Telco’s would not want to admit that the copper in the ground is increasingly unfit for purpose.   To update ancient Greek advice; beware banks (or Telco’s) promising innovation.

What was missing was the point that the purpose, for which these networks need now to be fit, has changed.  It’s a very simple point but not one that is easily explained to, or comprehended by, those who develop public policy.

Look for example at the excellent, some would say brilliant, articulation of UK economic policy in June 2007.  As an adjunct to the Comprehensive Spending Review, underscoring what was expected to be a seismic shift in the way the country was governed and the relationships between central and local government, we have the classic Treasury-led paper ‘Sub-national economic growth and regeneration’ followed a year later by its follow-up ‘Prosperous Places’. Perfectly aligned with the new aims and aspirations of DCLG, the ownership of key policy objectives and the way cross-departmental issues would be managed, the paper was a green light for greater local engagement in economic, societal and environmental development.

In these papers the word 'infrastructure' appears many times but the words 'broadband' or 'telecoms' do not appear - not even once.  The word 'network(s)' appears many times, but only in the context of social, transport, rail, skills and knowledge linkages between people, cities and government departments.  In the more-recent of the two papers (March 2008) the word infrastructure is used 11 times but again the words 'broadband' or 'telecoms' fail to appear.

So here, right at the heart of policy making, we have an uninformed ingrained assumption that telecoms has little or nothing to do with economic, societal or environmental infrastructural development.   No wonder that Lord Carter has such an uphill slog to get air-time for 'Digital Britian' whereas, in the USA, President Obama can so easily (and without contention) urge essential infrastructure investment in 'the digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together'.

It is, of course, easy to understand the two reasons why this general disregard for the infrastructure quality of local access networks is not yet seen in the UK as a problem. 

Firstly the last generation solution is not yet sufficiently broken to upset large numbers of voters – although the recent revelations in Ofcom’s speed-test reports and the BQS study by Oxford Said Business School have somewhat undermined  the prevalent cosy comfort.  

Secondly, those minority voices who may see and understand the dangers ahead have not yet found the strength and ability to articulate the risks (and opportunities) with sufficient nail-on-the-head clarity. 

It is futile, in this debate, to point out that other countries might be better at managing the issues of access infrastructure investment.  Whilst there are some great, blindingly obvious, transferable clues (like not relying on incumbents to innovate) there are always many contextual differences that allow the ‘Nay-Sayers’, ‘Not-just-yet-Sayers’ or even the ‘We-sort-of-like-the-idea-But-Sayers’ to loftily suggest that our home circumstances wouldn’t (or even shouldn’t) allow the import of dangerously continental fresh thinking. 

As long as folks go on thinking that the only reason for exchanging copper wires with fibre is to achieve some enhancement in transmission speeds – faster downloads from the Internet – then the debate will drift along with classic British overtones of ‘who needs it anyway?’

The case for wholesale replacement of existing access networks rests on delivering benefits that are way beyond just doing, a bit faster, what we can already do.   But here it gets tricky and uncomfortable.

To deliver the benefits that are relevant to individuals, to local communities and local economies, these new access networks require two attributes that are not yet fully recognised in current infrastructure provision and everyday experience. 

Firstly these access utilities have to be locally managed – that is to say they have to meet the needs of the local customers, local communities and physical environments and not simply conform to some lowest-common-denominator of a national plan. This worries people – as if it is impossible to countenance a notion of infrastructure interoperability in combination with the delivery of localised and competitive service diversity.

And that underscores the second attribute – that common Access network utilities should not be confused with the diversity of competitive Services than can be run across them. To some extent, with the functional separation and local loop unbundling imposed on BT, the distinction between Access and Services has been recognised but the full implications are still far from clear in the minds of policy developers.

It is not obvious to casual non-technically-inclined observers that each single fibre can enable users to use multiple service providers to deliver concurrent multiple services – user-selected blends of business and domestic services and local community services with very easy switching between providers and with none of the restrictive marketing practices associated with the last generation’s almost mandatory vertically-integrated sales models.

It is this multiplicity of concurrent usages that makes fibre investment attractive as a utility – a notion that doesn’t register with traditional providers hooked on (a) justifying infrastructure investment from those service revenues that they alone can control and (b) technologies that defend the status quo. 

The size of the market is another important factor.  The take-up of on-line digital services is directly linked to their usefulness, their ease of use, their local relevance.  The fibre to your home could, if managed by a utility alive to local needs, encourage a flowering of innovative services.  There is no shortage of evidence that this happens when that local utility network is managed entirely independently of the major service providers and with local community buy-in – but not yet, alas, in the UK.  Where this has happened the local networks have seen massive growth in local traffic – more local users using more local services. 

As individuals, what we currently experience as on-line services are things that are largely distant rather than local.  We do not have local community TV coverage of the kids football because we have no infrastructure that makes that an easy and affordable possibility.  We do not use our networks to help with neighbourhood baby-sitting or keeping an eye on property on behalf of friends on holiday.  We don’t have video-enabled health check-ups with our local GP’s nurse. 

We do not yet have that whole new service industry that supports local businesses or the delivery of local public services.   We do not have handy access to remote health monitors that would make it easier to look after our aged relatives.   We do not have the up-streaming transmission capacity to send video material as easily as we might receive it.   We do not have video-in TV like phone-in radio.  Neighbourhood Watch is rarely more that a few, hopefully deterrent, signs – a long way short of an actively caring community.  We agonise over the demise of regional news services.  We talk of flexible working but employers know that it’s still safer to serve up the systems in offices than to trust to the vagaries of home network connections – so commuter traffic continues to add to road congestion and air pollution. 

We have barely scratched the surface of how we could use the new access technologies because they are not provided in a form that that is usable and ‘enterprisable’.  We are stuck with an old digital pioneer model of limited functionality that misses the point of mass-market digital take-up – and all because we cannot properly articulate how this could impact on individuals, society and the economy without the expense and logistical challenges of frog-marching investors and policy developers to remote parts of Sweden. 

Maybe it doesn’t matter.   Maybe we can live with unemployment and the emigration of bright people who feel the urge to innovate.  Maybe we can find comfort in being a celebrated  international  case study of lost opportunities.  Maybe we are comfortable when moaning about a lack of community spirit, failures to grasp new investment opportunities, archaic health services or short-falls in quality education, and maybe we can do very well without a whole host of new cultural and creative artistic endeavour.

Or maybe, just maybe, enough people will get sufficiently educated, sufficiently informed, sufficiently angry about being short-changed, to vote for any new local government that shows some sense of enterprise, imagination and care for the economic and societal health of their community.

Meanwhile, chaps, keep up with the guitar practice.

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Parts of this editorial are linked to the CMA's response to the interim Digital Britain report.

See also:

 CMA Manifesto

The Hang-On, Hang-Up Dilemma