The Daily Telegraph Tuesday 6 August 2019 *** 31Johnson must strain every sinew to
achieve full-fibre broadband access
B
oris Johnson’s pledge to
guarantee universal access to
full-fibre broadband across the
UK by 2025 is a welcome step in
the right direction.
If Britain is serious about
building a tech-fuelled economy fit for the
21st century – and to compete effectively on
the world stage – then it urgently needs to
address serious shortcomings in its infra-
structure.
But with an estimated price tag of £20bn,
getting there won’t be cheap or easy.
Johnson will have to strain every sinew –
and knock a few heads in order to get there.
The new prime minister has pledged to
deliver Brexit “by any means necessary” by
Oct 31. What would he have to do if he was
to take the same approach to delivering full
fibre broadband to every UK home by 2025?
Government figures show that about
1.8 million UK households (7.1pc of the total)
have full fibre coverage – meaning a fibre
optic connection that runs all the way to
their home (so-called fibre to the premise, or
FTTP) – and delivers speeds of one gigabits
per second.
A much higher number access the
internet via a fibre connection which goes
only as far as their nearest green telecom
cabinet down the road – so-called fibre to
the cabinet or FTTC – but their homes are
usually linked to this by a copper cable
which dramatically cuts overall speeds and
quality.
Compare that UK figure for FTTP
coverage of 7.1pc to Spain’s 71pc, Portugal’s
89pc or even relative laggard France at 28pc.
In South Korea, the figure is 99pc and Japan
97pc.
One nugget of good news is that the
number of UK homes with an FTTP connec-tion is growing by about 80,000 per month
as BT’s Openreach unit and a host of other
private operators such as TalkTalk, Hyper-
optic, Virgin Media and CityFibre dig up
roads to expand their own networks.
That’s not bad but to hit Johnson’s 2025
target, a five-fold increase will be required
to about 400,000 homes a month.
In theory, that is achievable – but only if
the UK treats the roll-out of broadband as a
critical national priority and if the Govern-
ment is willing to tear up some of the
existing rules and fast-track others in order
to turbocharge the effort and provide bigger
incentives to invest. Existing measures
simply don’t go far enough. First, Johnsonneeds to axe some of Britain’s archaic and
unnecessarily strict planning laws that
represent the biggest single stumbling block
for a rapid fibre roll-out.
UK telecoms suppliers must wrangle with
individual council planning departments
and landowners, and undertake public
consultations for every large project or
piece of kit.
This in turn triggers a cascade of disputes
which must be dealt with on a town by town
and street by street level, inflating costs and
lengthening delays. Contrast this piecemeal
approach with Spain or Finland, where
dedicated central government departments
have been formed to streamline and
coordinate the process, minimise delays and
iron out problems. Take blocks of flats,
which should be among the fastest and
easiest households to connect.
In 40pc of such properties in the UK,
broadband firms struggle to gain access to
individual dwellings because the consent of
absentee landlords must be secured first.
Much the same is true of Britain’s archaicsystem of wayleave rights, where the
permission of individual property owners is
required to lay cables beneath fields or roads
or to simply string them out along existing
telegraph poles.
There is little reason why such rules could
not be relaxed or scrapped with the right
of access granted automatically to all
properties for the delivery of full fibre.
After all, hold-ups chasing the signature
of apathetic landlords should not be allowed
to stand in the way of Britain’s campaign to
install essential economic infrastructure.
The process is complex and fragmented
with a variety of different approvals
required to lay fibre below even short
stretches of land or public highways.
Much of this is unnecessary, especially
with modern techniques such as narrow
trenching, where cables can be laid in a
shallow trench as little as 10cm (4in) wide.
Roadworks are therefore quick and easy
to complete and there is zero long-term
visual impact.
To meet the 2025 goal, permits for
large-scale fibre development projects
should therefore be granted automatically,
after a brief notice period of perhaps seven
or 10 days.
It’s not just the planning and approvals
process that is creating bottlenecks. UK
consumers are also left confused by unclear
advertising and communication from
broadband operators.
Terms such as “fibre broadband” are
widely bandied around – often for services
that fall short of the FTTP real deal.
Either way, consumers should be able to
easily discern the various products available
while telecom operators should be forced to
observe clear rules to prevent the use of
misleading advertising.
Such measures won’t please everybody, of
course, but if Britain is serious in its desire
to build infrastructure fit for the future, it
won’t get there with a gradualist approach.
Boris Johnson should grasp the nettle and
deliver the changes necessary to meet his
ambition.Droning on A prototype of NEC Corp’s flying car is tested yesterday
in Abiko, near Tokyo in Japan. The vehicle is essentially a large drone
with four propellers that is capable of carrying people. The Japanese
electronics maker demonstrated the vehicle without a passenger.BLOOMBERGGo figure, why
the number’s
up for social
media likes
I
magine social media without any
numbers. No likes, no retweets,
no comment and follower counts.
You wouldn’t be able to tell how
popular you were on Instagram,
how many people were happy
about your wedding on Facebook, or
how many people were furious at you
and wanted you to die on Twitter.
Would you feel confused and adrift,
cut off from any sense of your own
place in the social hierarchy? Or would
you feel finally at peace, able to live in
the moment and engage with each
human being face to face, without
preconceptions?
For most of the past 10 years, this
vision would have seemed bizarre.
Metrics – that is, numbers – have been
fundamental to social media ever since
the mid-noughties.
These metrics make it easier for
social media companies to select and
recommend content. But in recent
months, two major networks and one
big video site have taken baby steps
towards just such a vision.
Last year The Daily Telegraph
revealed that Twitter was considering
removing “likes” in an attempt to
improve the quality of debate, and this
March it began testing a less dramatic
version of that policy which hid likes
and retweets unless users specifically
click through to examine them.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief
executive, has also hinted that he is
thinking about limiting retweets
themselves, after the button’s designer
Chris Wetherell compared it to
“hand[ing] a 4-year-old a loaded
weapon” for its power to whip up
online mobs.
Meanwhile, Instagram is testing a
feature which would hide all public
numbers on likes and comments. Users
will still be able to see metrics on their
own photographs and videos, but won’t
be able to see how many people have
liked or commented on other users.
Finally, YouTube has decided to
replace real-time subscriber numbers
with vaguer rounded figures once they
exceed 1,000, meaning a channel
which used to show “4,227” subscribers
will now show “4.2k”. These moves are
a far cry from complete demetrication.
But they do raise the question of why
social networks, which for so long haveprove it is listening to its critics. The
problem is that none of the features
Twitter and Instagram are currently
testing go anywhere near fully
eradicating data that lets you know
about your popularity – and for Prof
Griffiths and Prof Grosser, they don’t go
very far at all.
“This is just one little thing,” says
Griffiths. “In and of itself, it’s not going
to make a massive difference; but I do
see it as a positive thing because I think
it means that some people become less
reliant on those kind of metrics. It takes
away that competitive element.”
Grosser calls the Twitter experiment
“extremely small”. Indeed, despite all
their rhetoric about wanting to put
users in control of their experience, no
major social network even allows usersto voluntarily hide their metrics. There
are also many who oppose losing
follower counts and likes. When
Instagram began hiding likes in
Australia, Mikaela Testa, a Melbourne-
based influencer, posted a tearful video
accusing the company of threatening
her livelihood.
“It’s real money going down the
drain,” she said. “I’ve put my blood,
sweat and tears into this for it to be
ripped away.”
In the end, it may be that social
media companies cannot abandon
metrics because they themselves, with
their mathematics-focused culture,
have become addicted to metrics.
Grosser actually believes that a move
to remove metrics might ultimately
result in stable or increased profits,because users would feel more
peaceful about their social networks.
Are we ready for a world without
social media data on how popular we
are? Grosser believes it would create a
“more genuine space of social
interaction” in which people are more
able to judge each other’s words on
their merits rather than looking to the
numerical safety signals.
It could be a slower world, a calmer
one, maybe one less vulnerable to trolls
and information warriors. On the other
hand, many people find it a culture
shock to switch on. We would be, as
Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “condemned to
be free”, left alone with ourselves and
each other to live as we think fit.
How many of us are ready to deal
with that when we open our phones?Metrics are a crucial
part of going online
but they can also be
‘addictive’, writes
Laurence Dodds in
San Francisco
marched steadily in the direction of
more metrics, are now wavering – and
what it would mean if they entirely
reversed course.
“When we see a number that reflects
our social interactions, it’s very hard for
us not to want that number to be
larger,” says Ben Grosser, an artist and
professor at the University of Illinois
whose work focuses on the cultural
effects of software.
It was this “desire for more” that
persuaded Grosser to build the work he
is probably most famous for: a series of
custom computer programs called
“demetricators” which plug into
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and
render all numbers invisible.
Demetricators allow people to
experience what social networks would
be like without metrics, and for
frequent users the effect is disorienting- a sudden redundancy of purpose
which is both liberating and alarming.
After launching the Facebook
demetricator in 2012, and subsequent
versions for Twitter and Instagram in
2018, he received a lot of feedback from
users explaining their own troubled
relationships with metrics.
“Although I didn’t choose to use the
word ‘addiction’ in anything I wrote, a
lot of people would,” says Grosser.
At the same time, some people felt
paralysed or frozen because a lack of
likes deprived them of information that
they had unconsciously been using to
guide their behaviour.”
It’s hard to say where such rules
come from, but perhaps they are rooted
in humanity’s deep past: we are more
likely to do things if others do them
because we feel that it will raise our
status in the community.
Grosser’s findings are echoed by
Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at
Nottingham Trent University and one
of Britain’s leading experts on
addiction. “My research has shown that
particularly millennials get competitive
about the number of likes,” he says.
“I can tell you now, my ‘screenagers’
see those numbers of likes and they
want to beat them, they want to beat
their friends. It’s a validation thing: if
you’ve got 300 likes for a particular
selfie you’ve just put up, that validates
you in some way, whereas if you put
something up and only three people
like it that makes you feel depressed
and puts you in a downer.”
It’s easy to see how these dynamics
have contributed to social networks’
biggest PR problems. Without metrics,
would parents be so worried about
their children’s self-esteem or about the
time they spend scrolling?
Would political partisans have such
intense, obvious motivation to play to
the gallery and adopt the most extreme
versions of their own positions?
De-emphasising these metrics, then, is
a natural part of Big Tech’s attempt to
Technology Intelligence
‘It’s real
money
going down
the drain.I’ve put my
blood, sweat
and tearsinto this
for it to beripped
away’‘I can tell
you now: my
screenagers
see thosenumbers
of likes and
they wantto beat them;
they wantto beat their
friends’robin
pagnamenta
comment‘It’s not just the planning and
approvals process that createsbottlenecks. Consumers are
also left confused’РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS