Analysis: Think tanks fill up on broadband

Furedi believes that "the internet itself is the 'killer application' driving residential broadband adoption". This appears to be rather tautologous. Clearly there isn't a killer app for the internet (it would have been email or the web). It is more akin to an infrastructure and one that, like electricity, will support so many activities that soon no one in the UK will be able to imagine life without it. How we bootstrap ourselves into this situation is a question none of the reports answers.

In 'Always On, Changing Britain' e-minister Stephen Timms contends that "for broadband to really take hold in our lives, and for more people to take it up, more needs to be done to stimulate compelling content". (I should note that content is now an almost content-less term, and one that is regularly abused by government ministers, including Timms' colleague, DCMS supremo Tessa Jowell.) Liikanen argues that "[a] definition of broadband should take into account… the underlying basic requirement of bi-directional bandwidth sufficient to support the combined provision of voice, data and video", which would allow for rich interaction between people.

The discussion of person-to-person communication is in vogue but is over-rated. It is a fair observation that people naturally create 'content' that it is compelling to at least a few people and that it is free. It is also fair to observe that people increasingly seek person-to-person interaction in the absence of broader social and civic engagement. But the extent to which telcos, ISPs and others promote this model reflects a lack of ambition and the absence of the belief that they can create worthwhile services and products for their customers. Person-to-person interaction may be a current driver of telephony (particularly mobile telephony) but it was not always this way. Before cordless and mobile phones, and 'It's good to talk', the phone tended to be used by business and government and by people wanting to organise services and deal with problems. And today the telephone is as much a service device as a medium for interpersonal interaction.

Businesses, broadcasters and publishers need to take a lead in creating the future forms of information, news and entertainment. The PwC report recognises this when it recommends that "[c]ontent providers now must create new applications and content types". Liikanen fails to appreciate this, arguing for pushing old media down new pipes in the form of video on demand.

Business also needs to take a lead in creating imaginative applications of broadband beyond the PC. BT is starting to understand this but has not got much further than voice over IP and video conferencing.

Most discussion of the role of government and regulation is confined to the Adam Smith Institute report. Furedi considers the policy side of government, and argues that "[p]oliticians need to avoid the temptation of hyping up computer-mediated technology as a quick fix solution to problems and instead treat it as a basic tool with which to get their job done".

Government spending on IT and networking (particularly in education and health) is clearly helping pump-prime the broadband rollout but the New Labour free market fixation limits other initiatives, such as those in South Korea where, the Adam Smith Institute notes, "deployment has been more aggressively supported and subsidised by government".

One idea not picked up on by the think tanks is lowering the bar for broadband services, Minitel-style, by subsidising development and installation of 'phone-browser-SMS device-voice service interface-ADSL boxes' in every UK home, phone box and beyond. That would create a field worth playing on.

The contribution of think tanks and IT research groups to the debate has been substantial. Insights on the character of always-on and broadband speed, the nature of online content and the social changes broadband could effect are invaluable and have already moved the debate on. Now, there is a lot more thinking to be done. And a lot of work convincing business and government of the insights gleaned.

Nico Macdonald has been advising publishers and designers about information technology since the late 1980s and writing about design and technology since the early 1990s. He is co-author of the BT Broadband booklet 'Broadband: the Ultimate Guide for Small and Medium Enterprises'. He can be contacted at nico@spy.co.uk or post a Reader Comment about this article below.