The networked world depends on there being networks

Networked societies and networked economies rather depend on there being a network.

We only tend to notice them when they are not there or not working. On my wired connection at home, there is decent bandwidth with very occasional catastrophic failure. On my wired connection at work, there is what feels like very limited bandwidth shared among a very large number of people – the electrons occasionally approach the speed of sound but rarely, it feels, the speed of light.

Then there is my mobile connection. My phone often tells me it has a 3G connection, but in central London, it only does that when there is no actual data being moved about. The second I try to use the connection, it degrades to something dramatically slower. Not infrequently, it degrades to nothing at all.

The internet, of course, was famously to interpret censorship as damage and route around it. The trouble is that, in some very important ways, it can’t even treat damage as damage. If the final connection is missing, the health of the rest of the network is slightly beside the point (the main backbone is not as resilient and redundant as it looks either, but that’s another story). This has been a long running issue for the so-called final third: the mostly rural areas where there is not yet any semblance of any kind of broadband, with an active campaign to put the final third first. But it is also increasingly acute in the health of mobile networks, where the sudden growth in data dense traffic has left the operators floundering. There is an interesting article in the current New Scientist (but sadly behind a subscription wall) which argues that it is pretty much impossible for supply to meet rising demand in the short to medium term

Data gobbling smart phones are of course the source of the problem, as they overload networks with requests for web pages, email and video streaming 24/7. If the use of these devices grows as expected, cellphone networks across the world could grind to a halt by 2013 – and since many core services depend on wireless communication, the results could be devastating. The only solution will be an overhaul of the way mobile communications are delivered.

Of course malthusian predictions of the doom laden consequences of growth have been with us since, well, Malthus. His main claim to fame these days is to have spent two hundred years being wrong – though the past is no more a guide to the future in that than in anything else. But this does serve to underline that the service visible to customers at the top of the stack is the result of the complex interaction of many factors, not all of which are susceptible to rapid change. The shape of the 3G network in the UK was set by the process which culminated in the spectrum auction in early 2000, a time when nobody had the faintest idea what all this bandwidth might be for, beyond some some vague and misplaced thoughts about videophones and football highlights. The technology due to be implemented over the next few years to squeeze more capacity into 3G is the result of concerted development which itself was well underway before smartphones were anything but a rarity.

There is already some very visible frustration around. As I write this paragraph, Paul Clarke is tweeting:

No signal between London Bridge and East Croydon. None. And with rebooting the phone. This is the last straw @O2. We are finished here.

3 November 2010 9:43 pm via Echofon ReplyRetweetFavorite

@paul_clarke

Paul Clarke

With some trepidation, I wonder whether he is slightly missing the bigger picture. Perhaps between London Bridge and East Croydon there are other operators with better signals, but I suspect everybody on every network has had the experience of sitting on a train looking glumly at their phone with no signal while else is chatting merrily away. Of course, often it is the very fact that everybody else is chatting merrily away which blocks the next connection. I have frequently marvelled that Vodafone does not seem to have spotted that the presence of steel rails stretching for long distances away from London indicates the predictable location of large numbers of people who are somewhere between keen and desperate to make contact with the world outside their train, but in my less frustrated moments I am ready to recognise that keeping somewhere between dozens and hundreds of people connected in a small dense clump through what is presumably at least a partial Faraday cage moving at over a hundred miles an hour is probably not the easiest engineering challenge to have to solve.

The selling point of online services – from Amazon to tax discs – is that they are better, faster and cheaper than the online alternative. That’s a very powerful selling point, because they are all three of those things. The customer experience, though, is a product of the infrastructure as much as it is the service which runs on top of that infrastructure. For an increasing number of people, the quality of mobile connections is one of the critical drivers of their service experience. Ofcom research shows that:

In the early stages of mobile broadband take-up, most people used it as a complement to an existing fixed-broadband service. However, by Q1 2010 there are some indications that more households are using mobile broadband as their only internet connection. Ofcom research finds that 60% of mobile users also had a fixed-line connection in Q1 2010, compared to 75% a year previously (see Figure 5.15), and our research suggests that the number of households which only had a mobile broadband connection doubled from 3% of all households in Q1 2009 to 6% of all households in Q1 2010 (note, however, that this should be treated as indicative only, as there is a margin of error associated with this consumer survey research) . With fixed-line broadband levelling off at around 65%, it appears that the growth in overall household broadband take-up (up 68% to 71% in Q1 2010) is now being driven by households getting online for the first time via mobile broadband, mainly by purchasing lower-priced contract plans or pre-pay offerings, but also potentially by purchasing a computer for the first time, with a mobile broadband tariff that includes the price of a laptop or netbook PC within the monthly contract. [my emphasis]

The power of the network depends on the power of the network. Perhaps we need a bit less attention on the first and a bit more attention on the second.

And as a footnote to all that, the same edition of the New Scientist suggests that we may not need to worry too much about the network congestion caused by the proliferation of devices, if we run out of the raw materials necessary to make them in the first place, though their article concludes in a splendid piece of technocratic optimism, quoting Kazuhiro Hono of Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science, “The important thing is to recognise the importance worldwide,” he says. With efforts focused on innovation, he adds, “the solution to this problem will come out in the future”.

Digital inclusion: how do you tell?

Posted by Public Strategist

The 5th National Digital Inclusion Conference kicks off later this morning – with live video available free (though with all three main party leaders appearing in recordings, some will be more live than others). Their presence – albeit ghostly – is an indicator of how much more visible this has become over the last year, starting with the Digital Britain report and becoming much more visible with the appointment of Martha Lane Fox as digital inclusion champion and Race Online 2012.

A lot of that – for good reason – focuses on who is digitally excluded and what benefits there might be to them as individuals and to society more generally from getting online. But there has been less attention that I am aware of on the question of what counts as being included: at what point can you say that somebody once digitally excluded has switched categories?

That question looks deceptively easy. Somebody without the means or the skills to access the internet is clearly excluded. So somebody with the means and the skills must surely be counted as among the included. But of course it isn’t as simple as that, because neither means nor skills are simple binary states.

A while ago, I was talking to a young man looking for a job, and asked him why he didn’t look online. Because it’s two buses to get to the public library and you only get half an hour, was his reply. Or being in a library myself and watching an older man asking a bit tentatively if he could use one of the computers and being firmly told that he could book a slot for three days time. He turned away looking crestfallen and without making a booking. It didn’t look as though he would be back. Remote, uncertain, and limited access is better than none. But it is hardly inclusion. That’s in part because there is something transformational about the always on internet. The obvious excitement of broadband access is its speed; the more subtle but, I suspect, at least as important difference is that it is always just there. Access two bus rides away is not just less convenient, it is a different kind of experience.

But even once access is established, there are skills and confidence. Surfing web sites or writing an email is not the same as checking a bank balance or booking flight, still less claiming a benefit. Nor is that scale as linear as it might once have appeared: being comfortable with bebo or facebook does not necessarily translate into confidence beyond the hedged garden.

All of that shows that the question of who is digitally included is not as easy as it might first look but treats it as essentially pragmatic. But increasingly the question of digital inclusion is treated not as a practical question but but a moral one: 75% of UK respondents to the BBC survey published this week believe that internet access is a fundamental right, and 87% say that the internet has increased their freedom.

Another piece of research published this week, by the US Social Science Research Council (with a summary at Ars Technica) challenges the idea – for the USA at at least – that there are significant groups excluding themselves by pure lack of interest:

When we began our conversations with non-adopters, we expected to hear with some frequency from people who were not interested in the Internet… But we found no such group, even among respondents with profound histories of marginalization—the homeless, people with long-term disabilities, people recently released from lengthy prison sentences, non-English speakers from new immigrant communities, and residents of a rural community without electricity or running water. No one needed to be convinced of the importance of Internet use or of the value of broadband adoption in the home.

Nor was this view based on abstract ideas:

In most cases, non-adopters talk about the Internet as a concrete, immediate need. Non-adopters increasingly must use the Internet in their interactions with employers, schools, and government, as services move online. When people lack adequate access or the necessary skills to navigate critical services, their experience is not typically one of empowerment but of fear and frustration. For this reason, we talk about “drivers” of adoption—positive and negative—rather than the “value” of the Internet to these communities.

Job searches, education, and interactions with e-government services consistently stood out as the most urgent of these needs, and one or more of these figured in every conversation with non-adopters.

The question of who should be seen – or perhaps more importantly, who sees themselves – as digitally included is critically important. Abstract ambitions will not get translated into reality if we cannot be clear quite what it is we are trying to achieve – and what will count as success.

Travelling slowly

Posted by Public Strategist

Back in the big city, life is speeding up again.

I don’t have to get into a car to buy a newspaper. The nearest station is ten minutes’ walk away, not fifteen miles of twisty roads away. And my downstream speed is 5.7 Mbps, just over a hundred times faster than the 56kbps I could achieve in a Cornish village.

That matters in two important ways. The first is practical. Waiting for web pages designed by people who assume universal broadband coverage is a tedious process. The web stops being a seamless flow of connections and becomes an archipelago of web pages, with very slow ferries linking them together. Worse still, some services just break, however long you wait. Google Reader simply failed to retrieve some feeds (while doing fine with others), with strange and misleading error messages, I can only assume because of things timing out before they could complete.

The second is social, which is in part a consequence of the practical problems. Without bandwidth, there is a whole bunch of stuff you can’t do. That stuff is getting more important to more people and so, it is argued, it becomes a matter of public policy that people should have bandwidth. That gets us to the Digital Britain recommendation:

To ensure all can access and benefit from the network of today, we confirm our intention to deliver the Universal Service Broadband Commitment at 2Mbps by 2012. This can be delivered through upgrades to the existing copper and wireless networks. We also propose public support for the network of tomorrow so that consumers in the Final Third who will not be reached by the market can enjoy next generation broadband. This will be a longer project which involves what amounts to installing a new network.

At one level that’s unarguable. Speed, as Richard Allan has recently noted, does matter. More speed for more people is better than less speed for fewer people. But that’s true of more than just the internet. High speed physical networks, for example, bring some of the same benefits, as recent debate on new railway lines has demonstrated. Will Hutton wrote a column on this a few Sundays ago, Don’t let the defeatists and cynics talk down Britain’s need for speed:

Railways did not just get passengers from A to B faster than horses. The railway consolidated nations and national markets. It created new cities and city suburbs. It allowed the European powers to open up their colonies. Rail transformed the military geography of the world. For the first time, people en masse began to move away from their home towns and villages, massively enlarging the gene pool. Railways, like the internet and biotechnology today, were a genuine general purpose technology.

The intriguing question is whether high-speed rail will be as transformative. My hunch is that it will.

But the critical line in this context comes earlier in the article:

The experience of the Japanese Shinkansen high-speed network foretells what will happen – those cities that are part of the system will blossom industrially and commercially. Those outside it will wilt.

That’s being used as an argument that the big cities – Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow – need high speed connection, rather than just leaving London at the edge of the European high speed network.

Nobody, of course, is extending that argument to suggest a universal service. The Cornish village I was staying in will never ever have its own connection to the meatspace superhighway. So they are not ever going to get the Shinkansen benefits Hutton describes. That’s part of a trade off which some people make willingly and deliberately and other people have forced upon them. There are wonderful advantages to rural life, but density of service provision is not among them. That’s been increasingly – if reluctantly – recognised and accepted: shops, schools, pubs and post offices have all retreated. And although the Tate may be in St Ives, the sheer range of culture and connections available to me in London cannot readily be duplicated without the population density to support them.

So it’s important to ask the question of why broadband access should go against that trend, why there should be a universal service obligation for the internet which isn’t seen to apply in the same way to other consequences of a dispersed population with consequent high costs to serve.

One answer is that digital universality is in quite a few ways the answer to the absence of other forms of universality: mail-order shopping, the global newsstand, university, gallery and concert hall and government office can all come down a very thin wire, with plenty of space left over for gossip, chatter and games, to say nothing of all the things which haven’t been invented yet. Until very recently you needed a medium sized town for any of those and a decent sized city to have any hope of all of them. A more pragmatic answer, of course, is that universal broadband is feasible in a way in which universal bullet trains are not.

But perhaps the most interesting answer is that the question does not seem to arise: I have seen nobody argue that universal broadband access is a bad thing or that it is wrong to be contemplating some form of cross-subsidy to correct it. That is an interesting indicator of a level of recognition and acceptance that internet has gone far beyond being a frivolous luxury.

That still leaves one last issue: if there is a class of people without access to the internet for whom the costs should be subsidised, is the rural/urban split the right one to be using in the first place? The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s poverty site gives some clues, including the chart below showing a significantly higher proportion of poorer people in urban areas than rural.

Rural and urban poverty

Even accepting the argument that it is reasonable to subsidise the ‘final third’ because of the high cost and consequent absence of commercial solutions, that still leaves open the question of where the money comes from. On the face of it, there is a risk that the Digital Britain Next Generation Fund may be regressive in its approach to collecting money. Whether it actually is or not will be more complicated to work out: the very poorest won’t have a fixed phone line to be taxed in the first place, the ‘final third’ population may or may not be representative of the rural population as a whole, and so on.

And a final irony. There are still plenty of places in Cornwall where it is impossible to get the most basic mobile phone signal, let alone anything more fancy. One of them, miles from anywhere, down a steep hill, in a narrow valley at the end of the road was once the most connected place in the world.

Hobson’s channel choice

Posted by Public Strategist

There is – for good reason – no let up in the drive to add to and deepen the range of government services available online, most recently expressed in the Digital Britain report. But it’s important to remember that that assumes a level of choice and opportunity not open to everyone.

As a useful reminder, Leeds CAB has published a report on the challenges some people experience in accessing services by phone, particularly mobile phones, and particularly pre-pay mobile phones. It is very clearly written and very powerfully argued. There can be no doubt that there is a problem here which needs better solutions, though the available solutions may not as directly address the problem as the authors of the report suggest. At root, this is an example of the broader problem that in important ways life is more expensive if you are poor than if you are rich: pre-pay mobile users trade the certainty of not running up debts and being able to manage the amount they spend against high marginal costs in actually using their phones. Even expressing that as a trade-off is misleading: the alternative of a contract supported by a credit check and and active bank account is simply not an option for many. That’s a much wider problem than access to public services – but even if public service providers cannot hope to solve the problem, they must have a responsibility to consider how to mitigate it.

(thanks to Dan Harrison for the pointer)

Digital divide: cause or effect?

Posted by Public Strategist

It is beyond challenge that there is a digital divide. It has been less clear to me whether the existence of that divide is is something to be concerned about in its own right or whether it is an indicator of broader social problems – and so whether it is the symptom or the cause which should be addressed. Or as one of the commentators to the post by Eszter Hargittai I referred to last week put it:

I am open to arguments about whether the digital divide is something that should be rectified as a tool to reduce social inequality or whether there are far better levers to reduce social inequality that will eventually close the digital divide.

By happy coincidence, and by virtue of the Reboot Britain twitter back channel, comes some material from Helen Milner, managing director of UK online centres, summarising some powerful evidence not just of the existence of the digital divide, but of the breadth and depth of that divide.

Helen Milner Digital Inclusion The Evidence April 2009 National Digital Inclusion Conference London

View more presentations from Helen Milner.

On the face of it, though, there are some difficulties with this material. Slide 26 onwards suggests that internet use increases social inclusion, but it is not clear on the face of it whether people with stronger social inclusion are more likely to use the internet or whether use of the internet leads to stronger social inclusion. My slight sense of unease was amplified by slide 16, which attributes to the Oxford Internet Survey the arresting figure of 70% of people who live in social housing not being online – though reading through the OxIS questionnaire, it is apparent that no question was asked on housing tenure.

Following the reference to the research commissioned by UK online centres from Freshminds, though, it is not hard to track down the more detailed report, Does the internet improve lives? [pdf]. That presents evidence which supports the existence of a causal relationship, as part of the research looked at people before and after they had learned about computers and the internet with the support of a UK online centre.

UKOnlinecentrespiderchart

The specific financial benefits attributed to research by SQW also turn out to be supported by a much more detailed research report [pdf]. The figures quoted by Helen on slide 27 definitely give pause for thought, but a closer look at the detail of the data suggests very substantial variation even with the bottom income decile. Of the £276 pa potential average savings notionally available to people in the bottom decile, a fifth comes from higher rates of interest on investments (while 43% of people in the bottom decile have no savings at all, and a further 21% have savings of less than £1500), and a further fifth from motoring, holidays and mortgages (which again the very poorest are unlikely to be spending on). That’s not to say that this analysis is unimportant, quite the contrary, but it does tend to undermine to a degree the argument that people in the lowest decile are missing out on significant savings from not being online: those least likely to be using the internet now may very well also be those who have least to gain financially.

That though is a point of detail. There are two more important questions which it would be good to understand better.

The first is one which is much broader than the UK online centres material: working out what research in this area is trustworthy and which questionable is not straightforward. A week ago, for example, NESTA published the results of a survey showing very high levels of internet use:

95 per cent of people questioned are regularly using the web for everyday activities like shopping (92 per cent), providing feedback to a company or organisation (80 per cent), social networking (69 per cent), or accessing information from NHS direct (53 per cent).

Even that was not enough, with apparently untapped demand for government services supporting the slightly tangential headline, ‘Post Office queues to become a thing of the past’:

80 per cent of the public want public services to be made available online and three-quarters of those want this to happen in the next five years.

Unlike the material drawn on by Helen Milner, it seems that NESTA has published only a press release with the only description of the methodology being that the survey is based on a nationally representative sample of UK adults. Self-evidently, it cannot both be true that 95% of adults are
regularly using the web and that 29% of adults don’t use and 25% have never used the web. The most immediately plausible explanation is that the NESTA survey is actually of internet users rather than of the population as a whole, but they are not giving enough information to be able to tell one way or the other.

The second interesting question – or rather group of questions – is about the role of government in all of this. One dimension of government interest is clear enough: the very existence of UK online centres, extensive work on digital inclusion and the recent appointment of Martha Lane Fox as digital inclusion champion all demonstrate a sense of public responsibility for social inclusion. But what of government as service provider? Are government online services one of the carrots for attracting people online, or even an available stick for pushing them online? To what extent is the lack of access to government services, specifically, a component of digital exclusion?

People don’t end up online for abstract reasons. As the Freshminds research demonstrates, reasons are very specific:

Users of the internet typically have a specific reason to be online: Internet users from our survey and focus groups usually started using the internet for a specific reason. These ‘motivational types’ include Communicators, Hobbyists, Transactors, Functionalists, Knowledge-seekers, Family-orientated users and Technophiles, who use technology for its own sake or in order to keep up with the times.

I would be very surprised to learn that more than a tiny number of people – if any at all – chose to go online because of a desire to conduct business with the government. Doing things with the government is, instead, one of the many opportunities which are available to people once they are online. Related to that, but not directly consequential on it, the best way of helping those who are currently digitally excluded to access government services may or may not prove to be by first helping them get online for that reason. As far as I know there is simply no specific research which focuses on that question.

I started this post just with the intention of linking to Helen Milner’s presentation. I have ended up by finding much more interesting material by following her references than I was expecting to. Even with that, though, the question of the contribution of government-as-service-provider remains unclear, at least to me. More thought needed; more evidence welcome.

Digital exclusion – Michael Jackson memorial edition

Posted by Public Strategist

Hard on Martha Lane Fox’s speech at Reboot Britain yesterday – with a fuller account in today’s FT – comes a piece by Eszter Hargittai on the tacit social exclusion in access to tickets for the Michael Jackson memorial service:

Having the chance to win a ticket … required Internet access at several levels. First, one had to access a Web site on July 3rd or July 4th [a holiday weekend in the US, so many public access points closed] to sign up for the drawing. Second, entering the lottery required an email address. Third, in order to find out about winning, one would have to check email on Sunday, July 5th to see about winner notification.

So how come we’ve seen no buzz over this topic? Buzz these days seems to come from online discussions and by definition, the people being excluded in this process are not online. They don’t run searches on Google, they don’t use Twitter, they don’t blog and consequently what’s on their minds does not show up in data about trending topics online. This is just one example of how the voices of those not online and the positions they represent are systematically excluded from conversation and public discussions. Millions of Americans are not online and this is just one example of the many opportunities from which they are systematically excluded on a daily basis due to this constraint.

As she acknowledges, there is no right of access to an event of that kind, and as her commenters have noted, even the most connected had a vanishingly slim change. But it’s a thought provoking example of the way in which those of us who are online can make easy assumptions of universality.

More tangentially, it has helped crystallise some of my sense of ambivalence about Reboot Britain. It was an event celebrating the power – both constructive and disruptive – of the online world. I am in little doubt that it represents an important view of all our futures. But it risks leaving an over-optimistic view of everybody’s present. That’s not an absolute or necessary thing: Williams Perrin’s work on Talk about Local is just one example of how social exclusion can be challenged and redressed by digital inclusion. Pragmatically, though, the fact of that divide is something we are going to have to recognise and deal with for a good while to come.

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Category Archives: Digital inclusion

The networked world depends on there being networks

Digital inclusion: how do you tell?

Travelling slowly

Hobson’s channel choice

Digital divide: cause or effect?