The Freedman Archives, by Terry Freedman
This is not the most engaging article I’ve ever written, but I thought some of the stats might be interesting. If you look up broadband in schools, the story these days is that the provision is deemed “inadequate”. I think that’s a lot to do with how aspirations have risen over the past couple of decades, and is therefore a good thing.
Anyway, marvel at this blast from the past.
Broadband
Published on Sun, 8 Feb 2004, 13:55
In November 2003 people in certain circles were very excited because the number subscribing to broadband had reached three million. At the same time, officials at the Department for Education and Skills were jumping for joy because of the increase in the percentage of schools connected to the internet: by 2003 27% of primary school's internet connections, 86% of secondary schools' and 35% of special schools' connections were through broadband.
So what does it all mean, and why the delirium?
The definition of "broadband" in technical terms varies according to who you talk to, but the most commonly accepted criterion is that data can be transferred across the internet at the rate of two million bits of information per second. When you consider that in the early days of the internet that figure was around nine thousand six hundred bits per second (later rising to thirty three and then fifty six thousand), it's not hard to see why the so-called "information superhighway" was more like an information dirt track, and the world wide web was widely known as "the world wide wait".
ISDN and ADSL each speeded things up considerably, but the former suffers from the fact that connection speed suffers as more people log on (try watching a streaming video broadcast with a class full of youngsters), and the latter is relatively fast at downloading and relatively slow at uploading.
Broadband properly addresses the speed problem, and makes possible a range of applications and services which would hitherto have been regarded as pie in the sky. Incidentally, if you don't feel comfortable with numbers, you may prefer this definition, drawn up by the Broadband Stakeholders Group:
"Always-on access, at work, at home or on the move provided by a range of fixed line, wireless and satellite technologies to progressively higher bandwidths capable of supporting genuinely new and innovative interactive content, applications and services and the delivery of enhanced public services."
Perhaps the single biggest illustration of the benefits of broadband can be found in education. There's only a certain amount you can do as a teacher when the only connection to the internet is from a computer in the school library which is only open 3 days a week or alternate Wednesdays (or, worse still, the Headteacher's office) via a slow connection.
With broadband, the world has, literally, opened up in the classroom. It's now perfectly feasible to watch videos and enjoy other multimedia experiences vie the internet. . Throw into the mix other technologies such as interactive whiteboards, and virtually anything is possible: video conferencing, video on demand and interactive games (educational ones, of course!).
Even outside the confines of the classroom or school, the benefits of the kind of high capacity/high speed rates of data transfer that broadband offers are starting to be realised. Good examples in everyday life are online banking and online shopping, but new applications of the technology are beginning to be realised all the time.
In Merseyside, for example, four thousand homes have been given a broadband connection to local services via digital interactive television, using set top boxes. At the moment, people can use the service to apply to the South Liverpool Housing Association for a new home, but over the next few months tenants will be able to track the progress of a requested repair or application and make complaints or suggestions online. OK, it's not exactly going to drive anyone wild with excitement, but it's a start.
Other possibilities include remote CCTV, ie where the "tape" is not actually in the camera but somewhere else entirely, with the camera broadcasting over the internet. The advent of broadband makes this kind of application feasible. So, thieves may be able to steal the camera, but they won't be able to steal the incriminating evidence at the same time.
Similarly, the early days of making phone calls via the internet, characterised by long gaps between sentences as the voice data crawled over the wires, are now but a distant memory. Internet telephony has come of age (believe it or not, it's now an integral and significant part of "ordinary" telephony), and it's now possible to have completely free telephone calls within a locality. For example, it should not be that long before schools can contact other schools and their Local Education Authority (LEA) completely free of charge. Indeed, even mobile phone calls between LEA officers, or from Council officers to schools and residents, could be free.
The technology is there, but whether it can be realised depends on whether or not services can be procured in a cost-effective manner. Work has gone on in this area. For example, in education, ten Regional Broadband Consortia (RBC) were established to cover the whole of England, and their role is to buy internet services, broadband infrastructure and content for LEAs and schools in their regions.
However, education is not the only area in which the Government is promoting broadband technology, the other main areas being Health and Criminal Justice. Now, the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI) has announced the Broadband Aggregation Project under which nine Regional Aggregation Bodies will be created. What this means in plain English is that regionally-based organisations will be created in order to collect together and present to suppliers all the broadband requirements of the public sector in a particular region in a given period of time in order to enjoy the benefits of lower pricing -- this is what's meant by "aggregation".
A quick glance over the last two paragraphs may lead you to wonder what the difference is between an RAB and an RBC, and the answer has to be: not much. If we're not careful, local areas could be "served", if that's the correct word, by both an RBC and an RAB which don't communicate with each other. Hopefully, common sense will prevail, and the approach adopted by London's RBC, the London Grid for Learning, which is consulting on transforming itself into London's RAB, will be replicated elsewhere.
An alternative version of this article appeared in ePublic in 2004