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“Piracy tends to be highlighted because it is a sensitive issue but not every single broadband user is doing peer to peer and downloading illegal files.”
Photos: (l-r) Halo: Robert Downey Jr. in The Singing Detective; Quake
interactive
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in the fast lane
It’s supposed to be the future of home internet access, but if Broadband’s so fast, how come it’s taking so long for us to get it? And just what are we doing with it when we do? Ceri Thomas reports
People say, ‘How come there isn’t 100 per cent broad- band availability?’” grum- bles British Telecom spokesman Ross Cook. “Well, there isn’t 100 per cent availability in gas and gas has been around for much longer. There’s now as much broadband availability as mains gas availability and that’s just been in a couple of years.”
As of November 2003 (when the Trade and Industry Select Committee received evidence on the state of the sector from the major players), BT had enabled enough of their exchanges to allow a whopping 80 per cent of the country to receive broadband. Cook confi- dently expects that figure to rise to 90 per cent before the end of 2004, with BT aiming for 100 per- cent by 2005.
Why haven’t BT just enabled all of their exchanges though? Surely they’ve had plenty of time? The answer is that they’re waiting on enough members of the public at each given exchange demonstrate enough interest first.
“Take-up where we’ve had our Demand Registration Scheme has been higher than where we’ve just gone in and enabled
and that’s because local cam- paign groups - who we can’t praise enough - raise a lot of interest in the community. It typi- cally costs £200,000 to enable an exchange,” explains Cook.
“And although there’s 80 per cent availability, take-up is still less than seven per cent. In terms of investment we have invested more than a billion pounds in broadband so far, but it is a bit of a gamble.
“The fact is, that we’re not going to make any money or any profit on broadband for a long time, many years in fact. We had someone at the committee in November saying ‘Well, why don’t you just subsidise the small- er exchanges from the money you’ve made from the big ones?’ Our chief executive just laughed and said ‘Well, we haven’t made any money from them anyway!’”
BT’s goal is to have five million customers using a Digital broad- band Subscriber Line (DSL) connec- tion, 25 per cent of the available users, by 2005. At the moment, though, the figure stands at 1.5 mil- lion people, around seven per cent, using a broadband service enabled by BT (once BT has enabled an exchange, as Ross Cook explains, “all 160 service
providers can come in and com- pete with us and each other to offer services”).
Factor in – according to fig- ures from Oftel – another million users who access the internet via cable services such as Telewest and NTL, and you have over 2.5 million people using broadband in the UK today.
All of which begs one big question: using broadband for what exactly?
“If you look at what they’re switching for,” says Jo Baxter, BT Yahoo Programme Director, “what you see with broadband users that you don’t see with nar- rowband users is a much heavier use of things like listening to live radio music, watching video clips, downloading video clips and music, those sorts of applications.”
And, of course, online gaming. Both BT and the cable providers work very closely with Xbox and PlayStation to nurture the growth of online console gaming.
“Many of our hardcore origi- nal BB users got into BB because principally they wanted to play multiplayer games like Doom and Quake and Counterstrike online,” says John Hurry. “And now we’ve got a new genera- tion of users coming along who