Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Thursday 6 November 2008, 5:41 PM
Is broadband a utility?
It all depends what you consider to be the defining traits of a utility.
Is a utility something that is utterly necessary? We pretty much need, say, water and heating in our homes to survive. Broadband is not a matter of life or death, but we are becoming increasingly dependent on it in order to be fully functioning members of society. Does that make it a utility?
Some at the eForum argued that a utility must be an undifferentiated service. Water is water, electricity is electricity, heating is heating. Each does what it does, and that's it. Internet connectivity, on the other hand, varies in speed (among other factors) and is therefore differentiated. Many popular web applications will just not run on too slow a connection, but the electricity grid will either power a lightbulb or it won't at all.
In a way, such debates are semantic in nature. This one is pretty important, though, in terms of the debates over public funding and regulatory models for the UK's broadband infrastructure and industry.
Can we live without it?
PreviousComments on this post
By it's very nature a utility should be a necessity to life, like traditional utilities such as water and gas. To many Be members, their internet service is a necessity in their lives. We see it in the same light and in effect are offering a broadband life support system for our members.
In respect to comparing broadband to traditional utilities, this is were you need to be careful. Tradition utilities tend to be ubiquitous and uniform, e.g. gas is gas whoever you get it from, with only the level of service differing depending on the supplier.
In the ISP industry, this could be said of broadband in the days before LLU unbundling. The only way to get broadband was from BT or a BT service resold by someone else. True, the wrapper put around a service could differentiate a service from BT, but the product was essentially the same.
As LLU operators, such as Be Broadband, unbundled the exchanges broadband moved away from being a utility. Vast differences in the performance of the product are delivered through how a network is managed, what technology is implemented (standard ADSL or the faster ADSL 2+ technology) and the service wrapped around that. As such, broadband users should evaluate their ISP not as a utility, but consider what they are going to be doing online and how their ISP can deliver their broadband needs.
Oli White
Head of Marketing
Be Broadband
