Network management Toolkit

Green shoots must overcome trigger-happy BT

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 26 Nov 2003 17:50 GMT

So you want broadband in the countryside, and you want to do it yourself. You might think the hard part is coping with protocols, hooking up the machinery and getting the people interested. But just when you've got all that sorted out, the low drone of a bomber squadron sounds from the sky. At the trigger is Bombardier Yossarian, the anti-hero of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, ready to drop a megaton paradox more than worthy of the book's title.

You want to establish a rural broadband community where it's not commercially viable? Fine, that's what regional development money's for. But they're not going to give our money away to people who don't know how to run things: that would be irresponsible use of community resources. So, let's see a business plan. Ah, that's a good business plan: sorry, we don't fund projects that are viable.

Or a variation on a theme: you want rural broadband, but BT says it's not viable. There's development money if you can get a plan together. So you set up a local action committee, go out and educate the community, rustle up the interest and turn your sleepy neck of the woods into a hotbed of desperados baying for their broadband. Oh, says BT, thank you very much -- as part of our commitment to universal access, we now pronounce you viable. Have a trigger target. And now you've got a target you can get broadband and won't need the development money, say the rural development agencies.

Either way, the community's reward for hard work -- and often considerable expenditure -- is to be parcelled up and either handed over to BT to be consumed at the company's leisure, or left on the shelf. Not good enough, not by a long chalk. It makes Yossarian's famous clause -- you don't have to fly if you're crazy, but if you don't want to fly you're obviously sane -- look like an exercise in Pythagorian logic.

This is typical of the UK's official attitude to universal broadband access. "What a good thing," says the Government. "We're all in favour. Let's think about it some more." But without a stronger, funded focus that covers the whole of the UK, this sort of haphazard approach will leave the market open for BT to cherry-pick any regional development that looks as if it might make sense, and to hell with the longer term implications.