Three years ago, I wrote a piece that (unfortunately) is as relevant today as it was then.
I commented then that it is one thing to bring broadband internet to the masses, but how do we make them drink from the fountain of knowledge?
One of the challenges, of course, is that the industry has not yet sold turn-key applications that capture the imaginations of the unconnected. Surprising as it seems, email, Facebook, file swapping and web surfing have not yet attracted 100% of the population.
[Note that Twitter had not yet warranted a mention 3 years ago.]
I observed:
Are there some applications that might lend themselves to a toll-free model in order to reach the rest of the market?
For example, would home health care warrant installing a broadband connection as part of a monitoring service? The broadband access would be enabling underlying service, but the costs would be incurred by the health care agency, not the infirmed. Like toll-free calling, the application provider would pay the charges.
Your aging grandmother may have no idea that she would have a broadband connection coming into her apartment – perhaps complete with a wireless router. All she would know is that she can stay at home for routine monitoring check-ups.
Besides health care and elder-care, what other applications might “reverse-the-charges” for broadband access? Security services? Gaming? Entertainment? Energy management?
Among other considerations such as driving more universal connectivity, a reverse-the-charges model might put a very different spin on net neutrality – these applications will be asking the ISPs to bill them for a specific kind of access.
If Telemedicine has so many economic benefits, should provincial health plans be paying to install broadband with vital sign or blood sugar monitors into the homes of unconnected individuals with compromised health conditions?
Should our social services safety net include benefits to provide a computer and broadband to households with school age children?
We have the means to identify those Canadians that need government intervention to ensure affordable internet for all.
Yes there is it’s called: TV
This little application called TV always seems to be mysteriously left out of the discussion on what general purpose broadband would be good for. And yet TV is the single biggest usecase for all those zillions of bits that are already streaming into the households through more-or-less that exact same infrastructure. TV should be the killer use case for broadband. There are so many ways that direct download, streaming or augmented/interactive could be (and eventually will be) so much better than traditional cable/broadcast/satelite TV.
The problem is that there is no open market in Canada yet (well except via piracy) to deliver over broadband the majority of content that’s on TV. For the most part, rights holders and our charmingly-vertically-integrated pipe providers continue to cling to last century’s model. They’re not entirely crazy to do so. The business models for cable are at least clear. For direct distribution it’s still a bit of a dog’s breakfast and it certainly will be disruptive.
And meanwhile TV content, one of the highest valued digital applications gets potentially carved out of the universal broadband conversation. That and telephone service too. It’s amazing that so many people still pay ~40/month in separate subscriptions for services that could near-trivially be served over broadband.
If not for a telecom industry so artfully constructed to sell 3 subscriptions (or 4 if you count wireless minutes) when technically one would have done fine, the affordability and accessibility question would be a lot different.
Of course it’s hard to sell a solution of connectivity for everyone, when 3 of 4 most popular reasons for connectivity are carved out as sacred cows. Instead we’re left with inventing use cases like “telemedicine”…
A good topic.
I have always been puzzled why telehealth requires large bandwidths for residences (as opposed to medical establishments). We want to monitor Grandma’s blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, pulse, etc, in real time. Very good. But all that requires is the periodic transmission of a string of numbers — a 9.6K signal channel. The only aspect of broadband is that it should be “always on”. What else?
Remote medical examinations? Every encounter I’ve ever had with a doctor, he wanted to touch, prod, poke, and do unmentionable things. How is broadband a substitute? About all the doctor could examine is a rash, and that only takes about a couple of hundred K.
X-rays? MRIs? CATSCANs? Does grandma have this equipment in her basement? (The local medical clinic may. But remember we’re talking about residential broadband.)
So grandma may need up to 600K up. What about down?
Well, she may want to download medical information. Of course, it can’t be too voluminous or detailed or technical. Maybe lots of pictures with voice-over. That shouldn’t take more than 1 M tops.
What about educational medical videos? But what would they show? All such information is much better communicated by a series of stills, with overlays if necessary. Videos are less precise and can be confusing. (Drat! Where did I put the pause button?)
So grandma needs 1 M down and maybe 600 M up. But she doesn’t need this very often. What she needs on a continuing basis is 9.6K.
But what if she does need 1 M? Shouldn’t all grandmas have that at least? Well, in the access, sure. But they won’t be putting that kind of pressure on the backhaul — where, in rural and remote situations, most of the costs are. In fact, telehealth should put negligible pressure on the backhaul.
For comparison, the FCC’s National Broadband PLan Report, at page 210, says that a physician’s office needs 4 M and a rural health clinic with 4 practitioners needs 10 M. And these people are sending X-rays, MRIs, etc, etc.
So I don’t understand just how telehealth can justify more than 1 M.
Of course, tele-education is no better. I’ve taken a lot of on-line courses. The technology ones consist of a series of images plus voice-over, guiding the student through the schematics — just like in a real classroom. The legal ones were just talking heads — just like in a real classroom. Neither kind of course could possibly take more than 1 M.
Energy conservation and smart homes? Signal channel.
And yet serious people are using these applications to argue for 4 M — no, 10 M — no, 100 M — to each and every residence.
What am I missing?
George
George – I don’t think you are missing anything, except that you may have overestimated the upstream requirements.
People also cite energy management – time of day meter reading, smart-grid – as another driver. Once again, when you get past the jargon and baffle-gab, we are talking about burst of trivial amounts of telemetry with lower bandwidth demands than pagers.
Yes, I was carried away with a fit of wild enthusiasm on the upstream requirements. Sorry.
I found it instructive to go through the FCC National Broadband Plan Report chapters on various applications. The recommendations seem to be totally disconnected from the assessments.
Reminds me of my last job at BNR in 1989 — trying to discover applications to justify fiber to the home. One of the ones we came up with was the ability to check out the bar scene before venturing out for an evening. But of course we were a lot younger then.
Cheers
George
Re: Upstream requirements comments – As a tech dependent person who has 4 high speed providers coming into our facilities….we still don’t have enough uplink capacity to share the information we create on a daily basis with our team. we are NOT media people, don’t do video, but seems that PowerPoint decks are getting more graphic/visual, excel files are getting bigger, and word reports too….we will take as much upstream as we can get, and helps us reduce our amount of driving, environmental impact, etc.
Roberta Fox, FOX GROUP Telecom Consulting