I’ve been somewhat perplexed by the reaction of some sections of the media towards Digital Britain this morning. From, ‘More sketch than blueprint’, to ‘The show goes on’, to the frankly inaccurate ‘The digital picture is still blurred’, many commentators have failed to appreciate the big picture.

Undoubtedly, with an agenda as big and ambitious as Digital Britain there was always going to be disappointment for some. However, I’m genuinely surprised that certain sections of the media have chosen to criticise Lord Carter’s framework to deliver next generation access.

Much has been made of £6 per year levy to pay for the ‘final third’ of households who live in areas that are not economically viable for the roll-out of commercial broadband. It seems to me that the spectre of a new tax has overshadowed what is essentially a very workable resolution to this lingering and complicated problem.

The solution offered is both nimble and elegant, and more importantly the only framework on the table. Around the world other countries have sunk in billions of public funds into building their networks, or remained locked in indecision.  It is vitally important that we do not shut out a generation of innovators and entrepreneurs from NGA because they live in areas which are at this time, economically unviable to commercial operators.

A recent ITIF/LSE study suggested up to 280,500 jobs could be created or retained by next generation broadband networks. The report also talks about the networked effects, meaning the benefits are more than just quicker download speeds. Consider the boost to jobs and the economy from the industries that will be stimulated by rise of the smart home – only enabled through NGA.

On a separate point the commitment to universal service means more for the future of public services than anything else. The ambition to connect every home with at least 2mb broadband by 2012 is certainly laudable, but it is likely to have the biggest impact on the way public services are delivered.

Online delivery of public services could offer convenience and flexibility to individual citizens. Perhaps equally crucially in these straitened times, a switchover could save public money. That is partly because of services such as ‘telepresence’ for healthcare, which save time. But also completing a switch-over, means switching off additional or redundant means of contact or services – do we really need to consume reams of paper to fill in our tax returns when we can do this online? Too often the public services simply layer new means of delivery over the old ones, adding to the costs. The universal service commitment is the indispensible first step in this direction towards online delivery of public services.

Delivery of the Digital Britain vision will be made piecemeal and not overnight. A mixture of regulation, incentives and the levy will ensure the whole of the UK benefits from a 21^st digital infrastructure, not just those lucky ‘hot spot’ dwellers. No doubt there is more work to be done, but in his short period of time as a Minister, Lord Carter has laid down a definitive marker and given the UK a framework going forward that can guide it into the digital age.

By Daniel Smyth, Press and Public Affairs Executive.

Last night saw the the first convergence conversation event to be hosted in BT's iconic tower building. 65 people congregated to discuss the problematic issue of the future of broadcasting around the rather provocative title 'Is broadcasting dead or merely taking a break?'. For the big commercial broadcasters the landscape does indeed look bleak: share prices are falling rapidly under pressure from audience fragmentation and the migration of advertising spend  to different platforms. What can be done to reverse these trends, who will pay for the production of the content and how will future generations want to interact with it? The disruptive influence of the internet was identified as a game changer in audience behaviour and  it was felt that at this stage nobody had the solutions to the problems.
   

And yet and yet. Change in these sort of deep rooted behavioural matters is slow, incremental and generational. According to recent stats we are watching 11 minutes more television than we were last year. The Nadal/Federer Wimbledon tennis final was watched by more than 15 million people in the UK, in over 150 countries worldwide and itv.com just announced an 362% increase in video usage across its website. The landscape doesn't look so bleak now does it?

For a significant percentage of the population the passive experience is the one they still want: both comforting and conventional. Good content will always attract huge audiences, the mega event is still the thing that broadcasters, audiences and advertisers can all group around and extract their own value from. Outside of these events though it must be expected that people will go and explore the long tail for the content that interests them. So then, not dieing but evolving, not drowning but waving. The changes will be slow and the opportunities to capitalise on them are at least commensurate to the threats.

By Sam Ingleby, Digital Communications Programme Manager

Here's a "helicopter view" of the communications market from Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards given at Intellect's consumer electronics conference last week. Richards' speech was based around securing a regulatory regime that encourages competition, investment and innovation.

So far so good. Within the broad brush of the speech that sweeps from telecoms market to broadcasters, mobile players to consumer electronics manufacturers, a strong line on super-fast broadband was made. Richards wants to allow a fair return to be made to stimulate efficient and timely investment. He actually went further on this saying the return should be "commensurate to the risk taken" and made "over a reasonable time horizon."

We're into the thorny issue of risk premium here, recently discussed by European Commissioner Viviane Reding who suggested that about 15 per cent would be an appropriate level for next-generation access investment.

More difficult questions to answer for our friends on Southwark Bridge.   

Why haven't we built a Next Generation Broadband network in the UK yet? It's the perennial debate in the telecomms and communications industries, and is beginning to climb the list of priorities for both those in the media and the policy wonks down in Whitehall. Before we have a crack at the question let's take a quick look at the numbers that dominate it and remain the biggest barriers to its quick delivery. To roll it out to about 80% of the country should cost around £16bn give or take loose change, and depending on the solution deployed  - be it fibre to the home or fibre to the cabinet - will take between 5 and 10 years. The majority of this expenditure and time will be spent doing the civil engineering that is needed to dig up the highways and byways of the UK to lay the pipe.

The debate is moving quite quickly now, driven by a raft of new bandwidth intensive services that have brought us to a pressure point neatly displayed this week by BBC's Broadband Britain study which looked at different speeds across the country and received unprecedented viewer feedback - around 60,000 responses to bbc.co.uk apparently  - as people complained about headline speeds far below those they were promised. There are a number of dissatisfied and frustrated consumers out there. Hence the media’s interest in what is already a fundamental part of the mixed economy of broadcast platfroms that the PSB’s are now using (iplayer, digital radio and some simulcast stations are all available online) and the government’s involvement in what it claims it recognises as the crucial enabling infrastructure of the 21st century. Enabling here is meant in the very broadest sense, both socially and economically.

So what to do? The Broadband Stakeholder Group - the industry government forum that looks at these issues published a report this week on 'A framework for Evaluating the Value of Next Generation Broadband' that tries to quantify the economic and social benefit that Next Generation Broadband could deliver to the UK. Sadly no headline grabbing number here to make the case, just carefully couched analysis that sees returns to the economy being at least commensurate with any investment made.

There is real consensus that this enabling infrastructure will be rolled out soon, as business models evolve and ISPs begin to differentiate themselves in the market around quality and speed of service provision rather than just on cost. However Antony Walker CEO of the BSG framed the debate in terms of what economists call an 'option value' -  in simple terms the value in a policy of wait and see where you can learn from the other choices and deployments that are made elsewhere. This value does diminish over time but as Walker summarised, the point he believes we have reached in the UK is that we must 'Do it right, but not right now'.

By Sam Ingleby, Programme Manager

Netgear is a US technology manufacturer offering high end networking products for the home. One of the features a Netgear broadband router offers is the accurate monitoring of your home Internet connection. If your connection fails, appropriately enough, a little red light appears on the device and blinks a warning. Sales of these devices in the UK have increased steadily over the last two years due in no small part to this facility, as consumers have become frustrated with fluctuating internet access inhibiting the flow of text, pictures, music and now - the killer application - streamed video content into their homes. They want to know who and what is to blame. In this the little red light is a satisfying piece of technology; inherently binary (the only permutations are yes or no), clear in message and symbolic, it tells the consumer that the problem is not with something tangible like their computer or their modem but somewhere out of sight and intangible: the problem is in the network.

Now this is where the real confusion begins. Whereabouts in the network is the bottleneck that is causing this problem? The network is not a monolith structure but a complicated chain divided into different segments: we have in no particular order of significance, the exchange, the Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplex (DSLAM), the back haul, and the last mile. The bottleneck that is causing the little red light to flash could be at any one of these particular pressure points at any given moment and is affected by a number of factors including consumer usage and demand, contention rates and legacy technology. However - and this is the crucial point - the consumer doesn’t care; all they know is that the little red light is on and the Internet is off.

What is clear is that the network is under increasing amounts of pressure: in many ways this is an unexpected consequence of success, but it is important to put this pressure in some sort of context. Current talk of an Internet ‘crunch’ is misplaced.  More people are using the Internet to access bandwidth intensive products and services than ever before in the UK. iPlayer is an obvious success story here with some 42 million downloads since its introduction on Christmas Day 2007. Last year it was claimed that YouTube consumed as much bandwidth in a year as the entire internet took up in 2000. If more people are using the network, there are bound to be congestion and slow downs – the analogy with roads here is well made. There’s more and bigger traffic out there, things will slow down. What we are seeing and what the little red light demonstrates is the first ‘squeeze’ or ‘pinch’ of this increased traffic.

The little red light then is a harbinger of things to come though: the growth curve of internet usage continues on its steep incline. This pinch is an episode on that growth curve and indicative of what is to come as the pressure points become more apparent and the little red light doesn’t blink but beams.   

By Sam Ingleby – Digital Communications Programme Manager

I always thought it was BA Baracus, the iconic figure from 80’s TV show The A Team that coined the phrase "time is money". It turns out, like many other things, we owe this wisdom to the Greeks, in this case to Antiphon, an orator who wrote speeches for defendants in legal cases.

"The most costly outlay is time," he told his clients. Quite how right he was and how explicitly this maxim is now being applied in new business models he couldn’t possibly have imagined. Could he?

It now appears that the most valuable economic commodity in a world abounding in competing and distracting information, is our own attention, or our own time, and people are prepared to spend a lot of money to capture it. 

Welcome to the discipline of "the attention economy" that  advocates believe will be the dominant currency in new knowledge and information-based societies. This radical theory of value is focused on the relationship between advertising, commerce and societal behaviour. The current over-abundance and growing body of information that sprawls across various networks and devices is locked into a competition for the precious commodity that is our attention. This scarcity of attention has been compounded by the falling cost of transmitting advertising to consumers that has fallen to a sufficiently low level where more ads can be transmitted to a consumer than the consumer can possibly receive or process.

Technology has also played a role in producing this scarcity of attention. At one time the advertising model was relatively straightforward: find a big audience and speak to them, insistently and disruptively if need be, but ensure that your message is put across.

However, new technologies have facilitated the fragmentation of mass audiences to such a degree that advertisers - mega media events such as X-factor or the FA Cup Final apart - can no longer identify a mass audience, grazing like a herd of buffalo on the plain. The audience is hiding now, elusive and difficult to reach, on the internet watching YouTube, fast forwarding through adverts on their personal video recorders listening to their iPod’s and oblivious to billboards. To respond successfully to this paradigm shift in audience behaviour, businesses and advertisers will need to rely heavily on theories of attention economies.

So that’s the theory, but what does it actually look like? Well, in the formative stages it looks something like UK company Blyk, a free mobile phone network exclusively for 16-24-year olds entirely funded by advertising. Users signing up to the network receive no more than six advertising messages on their mobiles a day and in return are given an allowance of 47 texts and 243 minutes for free each month. In short, consumers are exchanging their attention to advertisers for an agreed set of services and products. Advertisers get access to an important and sizeable target market and can generate data and sales for brands from the dialogue they instigate with the consumer. This is a win-win and a notable example of how businesses are having to adapt business models in the face of falling revenues.

Now just think what you could have charged for reading this article… 

By Sam Ingleby 

Arsenal football club’s new Emirates stadium sits imposingly among the well-appointed streets of Highbury as a sort of monument to modernity. The club moved there from their former ground - known in football circles as ‘The Highbury library’ because of its Grecian pillars and rather fusty atmosphere.

In 2006 with the new ground is the identikit modern stadium: aesthetically pleasing, easy to access, and at ease with its surroundings. All in all it seems an apposite choice of venue for the first meeting of the government co-ordinated Convergence Think Tank, which the avid Arsenal fan and former Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) James Purnell established.

The venue captures something about change from old models to new, and manages to frame the debate in terms of the consumer, some 60,000 of whom choose to spend their Saturdays (or whenever the games are played in the Sky-dominated Premiership) there in the decidedly analogue world, cheering on the Gunners. Change, from analogue to digital, and eventually to a converged set of services and devices, and how the consumer will manage this change are of course, some of the biggest issues to emerge in the convergence debate.    

James Purnell’s good friend, Everton fan, and successor as Secretary of State Andy Burnham opened the event and outlined what he wanted the think tank to examine. He began with a wry remark about his beloved Everton’s Goodison Park, and the contrast with the corporate sheen of the Emirates before stating that convergence is something that, first and foremost, is being driven by and affecting consumers. As such when the priorities of the think tank should concentrate on its impact on consumers. It will look to encourage open markets, empower consumers and citizens and allow universal access to high-quality content. Legislation may occur as an output of the think tank but is not a direct aim.

This is Burnham’s second stint at the DCMS. The first time he was a special adviser and in his opening remarks he recalled sitting in his office back in the late 1990s imagining a future where everyone was using their TV to send and receive emails. It is a useful motif of how far convergence has come already but also how difficult it is to anticipate which services consumers and citizens will really value and adopt. 

After Burnham came the big beasts of the media jungle, among them Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, and Mark Thompson, director general of the, BBC both of whom spent time talking about issues of access for consumers and the fundamental difference between access and participation. Thompson read out a short letter he had recently received from a user.

‘Dear Mr Thompson’ it said. "I am a technophobe but can just about work Google. I googled ‘BBC’, ‘Iplayer’ and ‘Damage’ and there it was. Well done." That’s what is happening and that is what is expected, he said.

The think tank is a bold initiative by the government and has been warmly welcomed by industry. There are anxieties regarding its scope, scale and what it can realistically achieve, but to talk about the challenges this rapidly converging part of the world is presenting to consumers, citizens and government is clearly the right approach. This first session at the Emirates may have kicked off something significant. 

By Sam Ingleby, Intellect Programme Manager

Mike Zafirovski, the lantern-jawed chief executive of Nortel Networks, encapsulates something particular about the American dream. Born in Macedonia he emigrated to the US in 1969, arriving in Cleveland, Ohio with his family, $1500 and no English. Two years later, he got into Edinboro University on a swimming scholarship and after graduating went on to spend 25 years with General Motors and four years with Motorola before becoming president and chief executive of Nortel, the giant telecommunications manufacturer that employed more than 30,000 people worldwide in 2005. In short, a big cheese.

So when such a practitioner and proselytizer of new technologies writes an article in the Financial Times criticising the "barrage" and "jumble" of information that an average mid-level manager in business faces and has to process, in the form of emails, voicemails, phone calls, video messages meeting requests, we should play close attention. Zafirovski argues that at a time of unprecedented connectivity, business is singularly failing to reap the potential benefits. "With all this technology you might think people are connecting as never before," he wrote. "The reverse is true." 

Just in case the message isn’t clear enough, Zafirovski refers to the "onslaught" of new technology and paints a picture of billions of devices communicating with each other and with humans. "Information chatter is going to grow louder and so is the complexity and confusion," he said.

This seems a rather bleak if noteworthy assessment of the effect of convergent technologies making information available anywhere at any time. It also manages to turn conventional thinking on its head in the way that it suggests that the proliferation of devices and applications (an employee has six and five respectively in an average workplace) is having a negative impact on efficiency rather than driving it up, as technology is always supposed to do.

Rather than connecting us in a meaningful way, it seems the result of more devices and applications is just that we try more ways of reaching increasingly elusive or selective people. According to Sage research, 36 per cent of efforts to contact someone fail to connect first time, and this has a serious knock-on effect on deadlines and productivity in industry.

Unsurprisingly Zafirovski is unperturbed by this jumble and sees an opportunity for what he calls an overarching "unified communications and service-oriented architecture". Essentially this is a super technology that could "tame and discipline" all other technologies to help drive up productivity and enterprise. However, we are left with two of the abiding and enduring issues that technology used at the sharp end – in the workplace and at home – continues to wrestle with: interoperability and usability.

What this shows us is that convergence is having unexpected consequences. While allowing the free flow of information across networks and devices it is also leading to the fragmentation of consumer and business needs and, in some cases, the divergence of products and services to meet niche market requirements. This then helps form a looser, less interoperable, more patchwork system of communication. How to make all these disparate pieces into one coherent jigsaw is clearly going to be a long-term project. Zafirovski seems to be focused on the task.

This may be an unusual way to start an article, but put your hands in your pockets and pull out the contents. What do you have?  Some loose change, your house keys, a wallet or purse, probably a mobile phone or some sort of handheld device. If you live in London you’re very likely to have the small plastic card that is the Oyster: the smartcard which makes buying and using transport tickets easier.

That’s quite a lot to be carrying around, a fact acknowledged by mobile phone manufacturers who are looking to lighten the load by embedding the Oyster swipe card used by London commuters into a mobile phone, with a trial set to start at the beginning of next year.

This is part of a wider strategy from phone manufacturers to move away from only pushing entertainment functions onto phones (think music, ring tones, games and some video content) to offering more practical functionality on their devices. In this case, transport, but also banking. The Economist recently announced ‘The death of cash’ and there have been calls to abandon coppers in both the US and the UK as detractors say the coin is obsolete and costs more to make than it's worth.

To this end the Oyster money scheme has already included credit card functionality that facilitates small purchases in around 1,000 shops and cafes - mainly in the City of London and at Canary Wharf. In these shops customers can use their phones to make payments of up to £10. On top of this a number of high street banks are allowing customers to check bank balances and top up mobile phone accounts on their handsets.

M-commerce, as it is known, has not been as rapidly adopted in the UK as in the Far East where there is a very mature market, or even in Africa where mobile banking is revolutionising transactions and the transference of cash in the shape of small loans and payments. This is helping to promote growth on a continent where infrastructure provides a number of barriers to the flow of resources and money. 

So then, from lugging around a ramshackle collection of coins and cards in your pocket, the perfect converged handset could consolidate all your consumer needs into one place. UK citizens are slowly growing accustomed to cash less payment; witness the dominance of chip-and-PIN, and swipe as methods of payment. One device for all your transport, banking and communication needs. What’s not to like?

Although there are security implications associated with losing your single device, just like when you lose your handbag, as is technologies wont, this potential problem will only provoke a solution. Disposable or destroyable data cards can’t be far away as well as more sophisticated ways of locking or tracking lost devices.  Handset manufacturers are realising that entertainment systems aren’t the only additional features people are interested in using on their phones. By integrating these very practical functions on to a phone, they will also attract a different market share. Where will convergence take us next?

Australia has just completed a contentious election campaign and it came as something of a surprise to learn that Kevin Rudd, leader of the Labor Party, had made building “a world-class broadband network for this nation, city and country” one of his top election pledges.

Deeper investigation reveals that both of Australia's leading political parties were striving to out promise each other on their broadband deployment plans, the billions they are going to invest in network deployment and even the relative merits and shortcomings of different technology solutions.

And it is an issue that seems to be resonating with voters. The Australian (a national broadsheet) ran an article recently saying that: “For many voters in regional and rural Australia, broadband could be the election issue that decides who gets their vote.”

There are a myriad of reasons why Australia is completely different to the UK, but with Competitiveness Minister Stephen Timms hosting a broadband summit next week, there are three simple observations that are useful in the UK’s context.

The first is simply that broadband matters. It matters to consumers and voters. Across the globe individuals and families have been quick to recognise the value, the sheer utility that broadband brings to all facets of their lives. They can feel disenfranchised and excluded when they believe they have inferior access when compared to others. And as we saw in the UK, five or six years ago, and we’re seeing in Australia today, broadband is an issue that people are willing to make a fuss about.

The second is that, like it or not, league tables matter. Much of the debate in Australia was driven by the fact that Australia was lagging in the OECD’s broadband rankings and falling far behind some of its Pacific Rim rivals. You can argue over the statistics (and indeed the political parties are doing so as we speak), but perception, even if it is wrong, can quickly become political reality.

The third lesson is that an election campaign is probably not the best place to be debating the merits of different broadband technologies or indeed investment plans. Surely, these are issues that are best addressed away from the headlights of party politics?

By Antony Walker, Director of Strategy Intellect