IDEA No63
BROADBAND
In 1999, only one in five UK homes were online. By 2009, the figure was four out of five. That is not surprising. Before broadband the Web did not really work.
It turns out the one thing we dislike more than a slow internet connection is paying for a faster one.
Since the telegraph, copper wires have been used to help us to communicate over long distances. Copper is highly conductive, strong and pliable. Copper wires formed the basis of the first telephone networks and still dominate telecommunications infrastructure to this day.
Digging up the entire telephone network and replacing it with fibre optics is expensive. Consequently, a lot of thought has gone into how to squeeze every last kilobyte of speed out of the existing system.
In the late 90s, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) emerged as a faster alternative to dial-up connections. Data carried over ISDN is transmitted at a higher frequency than voice data, so it could support the internet and the telephone at the same time. This was a big step forward, but the relatively high cost of the 128k service limited its popularity to businesses.
Broadband appeared at the turn of the century. Digital subscriber lines (DSL) convert existing copper telephone wire into a data link 30 times the speed of a 56k modem. Replacing a single band with separate bands for uploading, downloading and voice speeds things up. Instead of a single, narrow band you get a broader band. Allocate more bandwidth to downstream traffic than upstream and connection speeds are further enhanced. Almost 15 years later, asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) is still the most common form of broadband.
Broadband meant the Web could finally compete with TV on its own terms. YouTube began broadcasting in 2005; without broadband, no one would have been watching. Without broadband, graphically rich network games, video conferencing, the streaming of music and many dynamic web services we now take for granted would not be possible.
As the technological curve accelerates, so does our need for faster internet connectivity. From megabytes to gigabytes and now terabytes, our capacity to create ever-larger digital assets means that we need even greater bandwidth to manage them. Moore’s Law (after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore) suggests that computing power doubles every 18 months; unfortunately Nielsen’s Law (after Jakob Nielsen, see User-centred Design) predicts that connection speeds double every two years.
When the Web launched, standard dial-up modem speeds were 14k. A slow broadband connection today is 4Mb. That is 300 times faster, yet still we complain. If Jakob Nielsen is right, we always will.■
