‘WE’blog

It was my intention to write something in this space on Friday, as I hope to do every Friday, time, teaching and technology permitting. On Friday, technology prevented me. Not the (still) temperamental network, but a glitch in the blog technology.

Anyway, we are now at the start of another week. Two stories caught my eye today (in fact, one was from Friday). The European Commission is planning to introduce regulations to make broadband available to all citizens http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7637215.stm and make it part of the general bundle of services that are considered basic or essential. As the article states, when the majority of EU citizens are using a telecoms service, then every European should be able to enjoy the same service. At the moment, for example, everyone should have access to the Internet with a dial-up connection as minimum.

Several years ago, I was doing research into the area of universal service obligation fixed telephony (ie making sure everyone had a telephone in their home). It is perhaps now hard to imagine that in the mid 1990s, when I was first writing about this subject, that there were still debates around the importance of ensuring that there was a fixed telephone in every home. The ‘unphoned’ had to be helped to become ‘phoned’. In the old days of public service telephony and in the early days of competitive markets, the service provider or dominant incumbent were obliged to provide a service to anyone regardless of where they lived and had to devise schemes to help those who could not afford to pay their bills. Then, of course, we were only talking about one technology (the fixed phone), and the interesting phenomenon of households with only mobile telephony was something very new and a problem as it was not able to offer the same level of service. Now of course we are talking about many platforms that can offer the same or similar services (think Skype, mobile phones, fixed phone…..).

Advances in technology cause problems for legislators and regulators, the so-called ‘lagging concept’, where the legislation is always behind the services or products that are available. It has been several years since I thought about universal service, so it was interesting for me to see that broadband is now on the agenda and is being considered ‘essential’. By the time the new requirements come in, no doubt the minimum speed requirements will no longer be enough for whatever applications people are using most. For example, the UK regulator, Ofcom, will first publish a statement on the roll-out of super-fast broadband early in 2009.

On a completely different note, the second story that caught my eye, in a blog by someone living in Glasgow, was two weeks old and concerned a naked woman who was seen walking up Great Western Road (a major road) in that city at 8am one morning. It was one in an occasional series of ‘Tales of the City’ that appears in that particular blog. In this spirit, I propose an occasional ‘Tales of Lygten’ for the MMD blog, though hopefully not involving people removing too many items of clothing…..