The Fourth Place

While the recognition of the internet as an important facilitator of economic growth is accurate and in some senses laudable, I find issue with the Government’s recent announcement of a universal service obligation for internet infrastructure companies.

A universal service obligation can only increase costs on the companies involved and must involve a large Government subsidy, a new tax or the involvement of the BBC – a dominant player in the TV and on-line industry who also benefits exclusively from a special tax. Such options involve a direct use of tax payer money, an explicit redistribution of wealth that will be harmful to economic growth in the short term, a slackening of competition in the telecommunications market, and potential bias introduced by a determinedly left-wing state media company. These side effects are I feel they might make a the measure an overall negative for the economy, broadband service quality and media independence.

An alternative free-market solution exists, but at a time when the Prime Minister is repeatedly criticising other parties for doing nothing, this option requires the Government to sell the idea of doing less than it does already. It is a laissez-fair option.

Wireless internet services allow for the widening of broadband coverage without necessitating the laying of cables along every street, or if there are tall buildings or other high spots in an area, without even requiring the raising of antenna masts. For example, I work at a building in central London that is signed up to a service run from the top of the Centre Point building.

Unfortunately these services traditionally operate using a small band of electromagnetic spectrum which has been left unregulated. An expensive licence is required to expand into other areas of spectrum and licensees are unlikely to share spectrum as readily as they do in the unregulated section. Simply put, more available spectrum means a better wireless broadband service but the Government is selling this monopoly access to this resource to rich corporations at the expense of normal people.

The solution is very simple indeed, and this is to reserve additional blocks of spectrum for unregulated use – that is, to stop regulating parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum previously allocated to analogue television provides a spectrum gap and an immediate opportunity for decisive action.

This idea and the deregulated spectrum are called “Open Spectrum”, because access to the spectrum is open to the entire market of providers from individuals, to small grass roots charitable or hobbyist operators (for an example see SPC’s Open Wireless Network), and commercial operators of all sizes – not just large corporations. This free-market access has the potential to fuel an immediate growth in coverage combined with a gradual increase in service quality as device manufacturers improve the technology. Interestingly, it may even drive a shift in infrastructure ownership away from Government and corporations and literally into the ownership of the people, with individuals voluntarily co-operating to mesh their own devices together to further improve services.

A Frequently Asked Questions document is available which covers this from a historical and technical perspective, and is quite accessible to laypersons.

Derived from a letter sent to my MP.

I’m currently engaged by a small systems integrations and – oddly enough, you might think -  web development company. That is to say, I’m working with a company that does web development, creative work and systems integration. I’m working on the systems integration side of things doing architecture and proofs of concept for an event driven integration platform focused around XML processing. This has involved a bit of rules based logic, arguing about defining schema upfront or letting the customer do it using RDF (it’s easy but its complicated) vs using relational databases (its complicated but its easy), a bit of coding with the DOM API, reviewing some  graph orientated process definition languages (if only to prove we didn’t want one) and some thought around long running business processes involving customers in an e-commerce context (which proved we actually did), and straying into architectural issues like whether to incorporate an ESB and what the hell an ESB is anyway.

This collection of abstract issues allows me and my colleagues to spend some time thinking in the abstract, and researching topics and increasingly seeing previously obscure links between things. For example, the fact that a web design company has ended up doing systems integration using a web language like XML  looks like a link, though actually its a complete coincidence which I only just saw. Other weird stuff comes up too, like the fact that the web page of a tool we’re reviewing was two clicks away from a definition of something very like what we’re  building, though we only came across the definition of it (and even  a related book) three months after we started to write proofs of concept. My guess is that it’ll be a useful tool.

Then came a less conceptually loaded link, in fact it was just a plain HTML link of the “if you liked that then you’ll like this” variety that lead me to an excellent InfoQ presentation on what REST is. If you’ve troubled yourself to read any of the links embedded in this article, or even if you’re familiar with some of the terms already then you’ll realise that this presentation actually sits right in the middle of the jumble touching on SOA, good web site design, and the importance of URIs as business identifiers. Of course good business identifiers are important in any system especially relational databases, almost certainly SOAs, and definately in Linked Data and in RDF and were a big topic at Linked Data Planet where I went last year so I’m seeing links stretching that way too.

Do you ever get a feeling somewhere in the back of your head of neurons rewiring themselves? You might just dismiss it as a headache but there is a particularly satisfying ache I get sometimes which is a bit like the aches the day after some strenuous excecise (another weird link) and its a feeling I get when concepts are shifting about and getting connected together in my mind. Well I have that feeling now, and the shapes being formed back there in the etched lines of synapses are pretty interesting, but are too big for one post…