Mike Southby

I read something very topical this morning for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I have for a number of years now been very dismayed at the quality of broadband this country (on average) has to offer. According to official reports, the average actual speed available to UK users is 3Mbps, not exactly staggering when you consider comparisons to the rest of Europe where according to official figures, the nearest lowest average speed is 4.6Mbps, now I know that doesn’t seem a huge step but remember we are talking average speeds and actually, 1.6Mbps DOES make a significant difference to heavy users. Now take a look at the claimed average speeds available according to the ISPs, here in the UK they will have you believe that on average we can get 10Mbps, sounds much better even if a little unrealistic but again, taking a look further afield into Europe and you’ll see they can achieve according to ISP reports speeds of up to 44Mbps on average.  OK, I understand that the limitations are massively influenced by existing technology and the huge financial and logistical implication of upgrading an old network under live conditions, but surely we can do better than 3Mbps..?

The second reason this post is topical has nothing to do with broadband.  Growing up, my dad using to keep and race pigeons, he still does actually so it’s something which whilst being a little strange to a lot of people, always catches my eye when I read something about it in the press.  Kind of takes me back to my childhood days.

So on to the story which caught my eye.

Going back to my original point about broadband, it promised to unite the world with alleged super-fast data speeds allowing us to conduct business globally in real time.  But in South Africa, a recent experiment has proven that the internet is no faster than a pigeon!  A Durban IT company decided to run a race between an 11 month old racing pigeon carrying a 4GB memory stick and the time it took to transfer a 4GB file using ADSL connections from the country’s biggest ISP, Telkom.  This I thought would make interesting reading.

Winston, the pigeon, took two hours to carry the data 60 miles – in the same time; the ADSL had sent only 4% of the data! Amazing.

Telkom said that it was not responsible for the company’s slow internet speeds (funny, I remember BT telling me the same thing not so long ago blaming BT Open Reach; hang on, aren’t they all the same at the end of the day?).  The idea behind the race came from a member of staff at the Durban Company, Unlimited IT, after staff there complained about the speed of their ADSL connection.  Flippantly, they joked that it would be faster to send the data by carrier pigeon.  “We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement” said Unlimited’s Kevin Rolfe.  Winston took off from Unlimited IT’s call centre in the town of Howick to deliver the memory stick to the firm’s office in Durban.  According to Winston’s website (http://www.pigeonrace2009.co.za) there were strict rules in place to ensure he had no unfair advantage. They included ‘no cats allowed’ and ‘birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within’.  The firm said Winston took one hour and eight minutes to fly between the offices, and the data took another hour to upload onto their system.  Mr Rolf said the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete in the same time.

Back to the UK and back to reality.

I guess I should count myself lucky.  The telephone exchange that I am connected to is a rural one; it does not offer any LLU services and probably pre-dates the Arc.  I live around 4km away from the exchange according to the route my copper takes so when I recently moved and placed an order for broadband I was slightly perturbed that I would not have an reliable connection, perhaps only 1-2Mbps if I was lucky.  Certainly according to BT Wholesales ADSL checker I was told to expect a service of 2Mbps.  However, I’m sat here today typing this on a nice stable connection in the region of 4.5Mbps, not exactly the 10Mbps average that BT claim but not too bad all things considered.  I’ve been spoilt in reality over the years working in the IT sector and having had leased lines and more recently ADSL2+ Burst lines giving me speeds in excess of 20Mbps reliably, but it seems that as times have moved on, the technology is lagging far behind.

I know there are lots of plans in the pipeline to revolutionise the infrastructure here in the UK, to actually deliver the kind of speeds we have been promised over the last few years but call me a cynic, it wouldn’t be the first time plans have not come to fruition.  I prefer hard action to plans, I would like to see things changing, I would like to see us taking a step forward and leading the ‘Broadband Revolution’.

Come on Britain.  Come on BT.  Give us something special; give us something to stand out from the rest of the EU, from the rest of the World.  I’d like to think I will be reading an article on how we lead the world technologically in the not too distant future and not an article on how Downing Street has taken to keeping pigeons…