How broad is your broadband?

I see in the technology press today that a new report is about to warn the government the UK has to invest in ubiquitous super-speed Internet connections if it is to compete globally. It's ironic that a few years ago the Internet was referred to in layman's terms as "the information super-highway" and now our access to *that* highway is about to be just as badly curtailed by low investment as our access to more traditional highways.

Schools went back after their Easter break today across much of the country (a few areas still have a week's holiday remaining) and the effect on traffic was immediate and devastating. Taking Nikki to work, the queue at our regular junction stretched back almost half a mile so we elected to take the next junction. As we passed the first junction the queue for the next junction came in sight and was three times as bad! I find it hard to believe that congestion levels can be SO much worse than last week, when even around the traditional rush-hour there was almost no traffic about. This morning it seemed that there were four or five times as many cars on the roads, but I know it's not credible that 80% of the UK's work force took last week as annual leave! So where did they all come from?

Leaving the motorway at the third most convenient junction and threading our way back through the side streets made our normal 15-minute journey into a 40-minute one.

Are we about to become as frustrated with ever-slowing Internet connections as Nikki and I were sitting in that queue this morning? On the face of it, access to the Internet has never been better. Only a few months ago, the average domestic broadband connection was 512kbps. Now connections of 2Mbps are common and more and more providers are offering 8 megabits and higher. But in the local loop these speeds are shared between subscribers and at peak times the actual bandwidth available to any one user can be much lower. With standard contention ratios of 20:1 or even 50:1 you may not notice any degradation except at popular times like Friday evenings and weekends, but as high-speed access to the Internet becomes a requirement in ever-increasing numbers of homes, these contention ratios will be maxed out more often leading to visible reductions in response times for more users.

The report linked above makes the point that in true 21st century cities like Hong Kong and Seoul, 100 megabit connections (i.e. the speed of your local LAN) are common. If UK economies are to compete on an even playing field, the time to start investing in a fibre-optic or wireless local loop is now.

You may be quite happy with your current access, and think that 100Mbps is pushing the envelope a little too far. But as more and more media services become available online, and larger audiences elect to watch TV (for instance) over the Internet using technologies such as Joost instead of via broadcast, bandwidth will increasingly be eaten away. Truly wired home working, too, requires additional bandwidth for messaging, voice- and video-conferencing services, online meetings with remote desktop access and whiteboarding, etc, etc.

The irony is, as better online access becomes available and more of the country's knowledge workers discover that homeworking is a credible alternative, fewer of them will be commuting and the roads will look like an Easter holiday period most of the time. Bring it on!