WIRED ON FRIDAY: Broadband access to the internet has been sold like a fast sports car, when what most people want is to get from A to B simply and easily.
Most people would agree that having a fast connection to the internet makes life just that little bit easier. With a decent connection, you need not boil the kettle every time you want to check your email.
But the simplicity of this proposition belies the intensity of the debate currently raging in Britain about the future of fast internet access - or broadband as it's known. Broadband advocates say it has the potential to give access to an almost limitless wealth of information and commerce opportunities.
Since modern economies live or die on how well educated and informed their populations are, broadband has turned into a talisman over which government, telecoms companies and the media are fighting tooth and nail.
Last month the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, addressing a specially convened "e-summit" in London, unveiled a new report from the Office of the E-Envoy. This claimed that Britain was second only to the United States as an environment in which to conduct e-commerce.
As an initiative to accelerate Britain's "e-development", the government will spend more than £1 billion sterling (€1.6 billion) on broadband for key public services over the next three years as part of a £6 billion investment in information technology. The targets include putting broadband into the education, health and criminal justice systems by 2006 and putting all government services online by 2005.
One of the ultimate visions of the report was a futuristic scenario whereby ambulance crews carrying out roadside heart surgery could be guided by surgeons communicating over broadband wireless links.
However, the International E-Economy Benchmarking Report, commissioned from Booz Allen Hamilton, reads just a little like a school report: lots of potential but could do better.
The current state of the broadband market bears this out. There are just over a million people on broadband in Britain. Admittedly take-up is accelerating - up 300 per cent in the 12 months since November of last year. By comparison, according to Gartner Dataquest nearly 30 per cent of US online households now connect to the internet via a broadband connection. Indeed, from February 2000 to June 2002, the rate of broadband internet use in the US nearly tripled. Britain comes last out of the G7 nations for broadband penetration.
Taking the report's conclusions at face value, Britain's strengths are the kind you would expect to find in a developed economy such as a dynamic business and political environment. The biggest weakness was also obvious: its telecoms infrastructure.
So the British government's decision to fund broadband infrastructure in schools and hospitals is something of a policy U-turn. Previously it had decided not to fund infrastructure but instead allocated the equivalent of almost £30 million to fund regional projects and an R&D tax credit for "broadband content".
In other words, they would pay companies to develop all-singing, all-dancing broadband applications, which hardly anyone would be able to see, hear or access because - you guessed it - most of us are not on broadband. As a policy, this ranks up there with the EU subsidising farmers to cultivate crops that will be thrown away.
Which country beats all others for infrastructure? Step forward South Korea, where the government invested not $1 billion in broadband infrastructure, but $10 billion (€10.1 billion). Some 67 per cent of Korean households now have broadband (it's 4 per cent in Britain). Koreans typically get 2 megabytes per second connections. That's four times faster than BT Openworld's standard 512 kilobytes per second.
This take-up is despite the possible drawback of having all content and e-commerce confined to Korean rather than English, where content could easily be re-purposed to attract consumers. Could it be that broadband content plays less of a part than experts thought in a consumer's decision to get broadband?
This hunch has been borne out by a study from Britain's Work Foundation. Instead of asking people what they wanted from broadband, the researchers simply watched what people did with it. The results practically over turned the accepted thinking about its benefits.
The research author, Mr James Crabtree, thinks broadband has been marketed to consumers in completely the wrong manner. It has been sold like a fast sports car, when actually what most people want is to get from A to B, simply and easily. This will come as a surprise to the marketers responsible for BT's current advertising campaign, which features celebrities and cartoon monsters poring out of the broadband pipe at a rate of knots.
The Work Foundation found that the speed of internet access and the "always-on" nature of broadband were not its main selling points. Apart from anything else, most people have their PCs switched off, so an "always-on" connection is irrelevant. Instead, the average home user enjoys the ability to "dip in and out" of the internet without having to worry about the bill, since broadband is charged at a flat rate.
The result is that they relax, and actually start to use it more and with growing confidence. Broadband did not transform their behaviour in many other noticeable ways. Nor was the desire for specifically tailored broadband content like video and gaming a very big factor for the average user.
It somehow seemed almost appropriate then that Mr David Docherty, head of broadband content for cable company Telewest, resigned only days before Mr Blair's new commitment to broadband infrastructure and the Work Foundation's report.
Mr Docherty left, blaming the poor perception of what he characterised as "rich broadband content" - exactly how Telewest and BT have been selling broadband. But to paraphrase noted British Web architect Mr Matt Jones, the speed of the connection is inversely proportional to the "richness" of the content. In other words broadband content tends to appear slower, which is why people often get fed up with it.
Some might well argue that Mr Docherty's argument has now been scotched. From here on, policy thinking about broadband looks likely to be dominated by speed and availability, not content.
mike@mbites.com
