Broadband from a telco? Don’t make me laugh

It doesn´t matter how you define broadband but let´s try. In 1984, the general definition of broadband (in most normal worlds, this is called a “standard”) was the ability to simultaneously transmit and receive voice, video and data.

No numbers were used, and certainly no “up tos” because it was about quality. You either could TX (transmit) and RX (receive) voice, video and data simultaneously. Or you couldn´t. The quality control was in the audience perception — ´nope, blurry and stilted audio´ meant it was NOT a broadband connection. Pretty simple, really! No advertising standards agencies, no regulators, just consumers saying…Nope, doesn´t work.

Just as a reminder…that was 1984.

Roll forward to 2000: How´s your broadband, honey? All working great?

Well, for most people, broadband was still not even a common word and the chance of finding a video online that wasn´t pr0n meant that most people were text bound. And most people´s connections were so damned slow that even the idea of trying to watch a video, any video, was…well, 21st century. It would take weeks to download and there was a level of jealousy — how did the pr0n guys upload videos?

There were rumours of hacks over public telephone networks, a misuse of the free local call scenario in USA, and these mystical solutions called T1 lines.

I remember translating that into an E1 line (Europe not US) in the mid 90s and getting a quote for £28,000 (think dollars) for a 2Mbps feed for a year. To go online and chat to a few folk? REALLY?! And watch…errr, what? No-one making great videos could afford a T1 or E1 line unless they were selling all sorts of grubby bits of themselves and I was most definitely not interested in that.

Next option: allow people to connect over dial up (an already over-amortised solution, like by 100 years). Wow, this was a novelty, not by minute (thank you telcos for your greed) but for however long they wish to. Roll in FRIACO.

Flat Rate Internet Access took Europe apart.

For those of us just wanting to get online and not run up monthly bills equivalent to a mortgage in <some very expensive place>, FRIACO and the work of CUT (Campaign for Unmetered Telecoms) changed the landscape for ever. We could get online, however slow and miserable it was, and stay there. For weeks, months. For the same monthly price.

I don´t know if you have ever watched a £1600 debt/quarter drop to £10 but I have. I didn´t just watch it, I lived it. I was most definitely not alone. The telcos might have been watching their greed income drop off but for many millions of us across Europe, the internet suddenly become affordable.

(Not for me as I had to set up a business to pay the bank back for that loan of £1600 for 3 months online. I am still escaping that situation, although increasingly with a positive touch, 20 years later. For everything else there is Mastercard, right?!).

And did we cheer. In fact, many of us still are cheering. Even though some of us now work for (and often against) those self-same greedy telcos.

Who. Still. Cannot. Deliver Broadband. 30. Years. Later.

The communities however did not cheer. Telco promises to MPs, senators, grant funding bodies etc all inevitably (for 20 + years) have ended up in failure. And a sickening waste of cash.

Communities inevitably just said, “Stuff you” and set off to build a better solution. Or hundreds. Thousands of community networks. Many have fallen by the wayside, usually to some really dodgy tricks by telcos or plain ignorance from governments, local and national.

The ones who are left? Blow your mind. Can you imagine paying less than (pick a currency — $, £, Yen, euros etc, all so similar now) 30 a month for a symmetrical gigabit with no usage limits? If you can´t, you must be stuck with a gut-rippingly greedy telco.

I have travelled the world for nearly 20 years visiting the amazing people who build these networks, so often in the face of government corruption, telco nastiness and greed, and just downright stupidity, eejuts determined to take these right-minded folk out of the picture. Once you know their stories, you will fight for their and YOUR connection too.

Part 2 to follow.

Lindsey lives by JFDI and has fought for over 20 years for true broadband. She coined the term FiWi (Fibre-Wireless) way back when and has been involved with, built, encouraged, and written about 100s of community broadband networks across the world with fibre as the critical component, even in deeply rural areas. One of the three co-founders of B4RN — Broadband for the Rural North, (deeply rural symmetrical community-owned gigabit fibre to the EVERYWHERE), co-founder of the Access to Broadband Campaign and many more initiatives, she is currently seeking the ultimate fibre community network in which to settle. For an hour or two. Sufficient to upload and download a couple of TB, thanks.