PhoneAbility

3. Broadband Britain; an introduction to broadband

KEITH LAWTON - Head of Service, Broadband Complaint Process and Business Continuity

I thought I would give you an overview of where we are in the UK, certainly from a BT perspective. I would be happy to take questions towards the end, and hopefully you will find that we do keep our promises in terms of looking at the sector where we need to help people get access to broadband, for whatever reason.

Our agenda for the next half an hour is, "What is broadband?" What is important, as Stephen said, is that we are actually at the entry into broadband in many ways. If you go back about 120 years in this country, we had gas lighting in people's homes. Electricity was brought in to people's homes for lighting because there were too many homes catching fire from gas! At that time, when electricity came into homes, we did not know about fridges, freezers, microwaves and computers.

In some ways, this is here we are with broadband today, so in terms of what is broadband, we will go on a journey to explore that. I will take you through some of the services. Following my presentation, Chris Aver from BT Yahoo!! will explore those in more detail. I think it is important to talk about the reach and the coverage of broadband, because it is access for all at two levels. It is the physical access of getting the broadband service to people's homes, and it is also about using it when you have it, and how you can use it. We are also talking about digital inclusion and telecare.

So, what is broadband? If you were to ask this question probably two years ago, people would talk to you about dial-up Internet. It is ten times faster than dialling up. It means you can download e-mails quicker and you can download files faster, but today it is more about content and applications. What are the things that you can use that will help you in your life, whether it is at work or in society? In terms of what is available, this is only a brief view of some of the things.

Most homes in this country now have two computers rather than one. If you look at the 100-plus companies or service providers that you can buy broadband from, they tend to offer what we call wireless routers, the device that allows you to access broadband through more than one PC simultaneously. We have our webcams for home monitoring. Stephen Speed talked about the 3G mobile, and Tony Shipley did as well. To give you a picture perhaps of the future; if you are on holiday or you are away from home, and you have said to your teenage children, "You are not going to have any parties at home while we are away. We want the house to be organised when we get back home," with your 3G mobile phone with the video service, you would be accessing your broadband phone line and you can see if they are having a party in your home while you are away, through your webcam! You might even want to turn the stereo off as well remotely, if it is too loud! That is a bit of a fun thing, but there are also some significant social consequences as well in terms of how we can use broadband. In a few moments, I will take you through something called Telecare.

There is broadband radio, which gives the ability to choose radio stations from around the world to listen to what is available. It is also about making use of that speed for applications. We know of people who are members of embroidery clubs, who download patterns of embroidery, which are big files. They can get the pattern and print it out and put it in various colours. It is the same with rambler's associations.

We have the pay-as-you-go broadband offer now. BT Open Zone is a WiFi or wireless access product where you can go into a pub or a hotel, or even into McDonald's, and you can access the broadband service. Then there is the communicator package, which Chris will talk to you about.

More importantly, let us talk about access in terms of coverage. In March last year, we had about two-thirds of the UK covered. We launched a pre-registration scheme, the only scheme in the world, where we said to people, "If you want broadband, sign up for us and tell us." Every exchange that we convert costs a quarter of a million pounds and we have 5,500 to convert. We are converting at the rate of about 30 a week, on average, and a conversion takes six weeks. It is a big investment for us as a company. It is not guaranteed that everybody will take broadband as a result of enabling a telephone exchange.

Today, the coverage figure is roundabout 91%. We have enabled nearly 2,800 exchanges now, so we are well on our way. We have had a trial in the summer of this year to try and get broadband to customer's homes who are a long way from the telephone exchange. We are now able to deliver it at what we call the half-megabit service, the 512,000 bits per second service, to roughly eight kilometres as the telephone line is routed from the exchange to a customer's home. That is better than anywhere else in the world, which is a tremendous achievement.
Beyond eight kilometres, we are struggling with the laws of physics at the moment.

This is the one marketing slide (Fig 3.1), I promise you, and after that we will talk about real things! This is really an indication of where we are going. Maybe you are running late to get home and you want to watch your favourite programme. It may not be a soap opera; it may be a documentary. Currently, whatever device you have, however you wish to use broadband, the only way you can do that is by phoning somebody at home to say, "Can you set the video for me, please." You may be lucky enough to have a personal video recorder, or you may have to miss the programme. With broadband, in a couple of years` time, or probably less, you will be able to programme your video over your broadband connection. What we are looking for is to give broadband service wherever you are, on whatever device.

What's Available

Fig 3.1 BT broadband products

I have a prediction for you. The big thing that will be selling this Christmas is the Apple iPod. Maybe we will have a broadband iPod and you will just stand outside in the street and download your songs. You may have your photographs on it. The world is changing.

But in terms of now, more importantly, we hear these words of digital inclusion and digital divide. Let us look at the social background. We do have some significant issues to crack in society, and BT is part of that. Whether it is about illiteracy, whether it is about physical difficulties, there are areas that we need to focus on and continue to work in.

People talk about connectivity, content and capability. What we have to ensure is that we get the balance right in terms of the people who need access to do the things they want to do.From a study that we have undertaken, we find that people who have been excluded from the broadband communications tend to contact Government for needs and issues ten times more than average.

So, in terms of digital inclusion, yes, we do have our corporate social responsibility, and we have commercial drivers for doing that. We are doing it, and the next few slides will show you that.

We have Internet take-up in areas where people thought they could not have it. We have "net mums", which is an interesting group of people who have been brought together. They take their children to school and then sit down and with the help of somebody who knows about a computer - and I do not mean the technical workings of it, but in terms of the mouse, the space bar - they are shown how the Internet can help them. In another project, we are helping homeless people in Glasgow to give them access to information. Broadband is really an enabling technology. It is there to get information to the right people who need it, when they need it, so they can act on it.

We have our digital inclusion campaign. You may or may not have heard of some of these. EverybodyOnline is one. E-Wellbeing Awards, giving the people the ability to develop websites for their particular needs. These may not necessarily be due to commercial needs, but social needs. We have the Internet Rangers for children, and we have an Alliance for Digital Inclusion that BT is a driving force behind.

EverybodyOnline is a series of local projects to stimulate people to see what needs to be done for them. If you look at the things we are doing, within that, we have gone for eight pilot sites around the UK where broadband need is greatest from a social point of view. Stephen Speed talked about the Lake District earlier. We are working through with these people the things that they need. We are trying to take away the mystery of broadband and computing.

I don`t know about you but, when I was at school, we did not have computers. We did not even have calculators and it was all mental arithmetic, adding up on pieces of paper. Our children come out today skilled in how to use computers and programs. We see them as a really valuable way of helping us to help those people in society, whether it is grandparents, parents or social groups, to help them understand how they can use a computer and how broadband can help them. We are linked in with Microsoft, Dixons and Citizens Online to deliver that.

With our Internet Rangers, it is about giving people confidence and capability. You tend to hear about broadband and dodgy websites, and the unpleasant side, but there is some really good stuff out there as well. We are trying to bring a sense of understanding and security into broadband, so that people can use it in the right way. However, we are not there as moral judges, that is not our role.

BT Internet Rangers - confidence & capability

Fig 3.2 Usage of Broadband

If you look at some of the facts above, Fig 3.2, we have parents who actually do not know what to do. What we have seen in the market since September of this year is a lot more people buying broadband because their children are telling them they need it for school, or they need it for network gaming. If you look at the age of the children on this slide, what we have is five to eight-year-olds. What a fantastic, valuable resource in our children, being equipped today, at that age, ready for the future, and how they can help us.

Telecare - The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to support independent living for older, frail and disabled people

Fig 3.3 ICT and independent living

In terms of Telecare, I wonder if anyone has seen the film "Entrapment", with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones, with the infrared beams, where they were trying to steal some jewellery wearing a mask? Telecare is similar to that, I do not mean in terms of the stealing, but in terms of the infrared beams. We have a project about how we are looking after people who wish to continue living independently in society, and who normally, because of their age, would need a lot more care, perhaps in a home. We have a way forward for enabling these people to continue living where they want to live. If we look at the costs involved, FIG 3.3, we are talking of £3,000 to £5,000 a year per person, and people that want to stay in their own homes.

Fig 3.4 Automated care system

What we have is a service where, through a broadband connection, we have put in infrared beams in each room of a flat. We know that, as the person walks through the room, their body or their legs stop the beams of light from reaching one end of the room to the other. The computer programme works out how many beams of light normally get broken, and how long it takes a person to walk across the room. If they fall over, their body will stop more beams of light from travelling across the room. That tells us there is a problem. If they have left the gas cooker ring on and it has not ignited after 10 or 20 seconds, we will switch it off. If the back door is left open, for longer than a small period of time, we will then raise an alarm about that.

Telecare: Results to date

Fig 3.5 Results from Telecare

This is all part of a service we are trialling in Liverpool called the Telecare project. It is giving independence to people who normally at their time in life would not have that. We have 20 installations so far and have had very positive feedback. People are saying to us, "I feel safe." As one lady said, "I can sleep at night." This is a step forward and is possible because of broadband - something we could not have done before, Fig 3.5.

It has come about by the work we have done with these universities (which universities ??) and with a company called Next Wave. It is something different, and perhaps something we would not normally think of, so broadband does have a social benefit as well as for people who want to download music or play games, or all the things you tend to read about in the press.

Finally, we have just helped to sponsor the Deaf Olympics in Australia in May 2005. We are providing a broadband link and webcam for the 102 athletes who go there. When they have won a race or taken part in a competition, they can come back in to the centre. Through the broadband link and webcam, they can then communicate back to the UK. Currently this communication is sent as a text message on a mobile perhaps, but this is about communicating in real time.

So, there are ways that broadband can help. There are many more things we need to look at, but I feel we are now on the road to doing something about it, and we have some interesting pilot projects. The possibilities are endless and what would help us in BT is for you to tell us about what those possibilities are, because we do not know them all. We do need your help.

Discussion

KARL FARRELL: I am a visually impaired person and I have a point to make. I certainly appreciate the technology, and I am glad for all of the benefits it is bringing, and I hope we will find it will bring in the future. But I would like to give an example of a situation where a certain small number of people can use this.

Visually impaired people have problems with regard to all the new technologies, even though people say with this new technology we can design in benefits for everybody and nobody needs to be left out. However, websites and things can be difficult to access. They might look fine, but they do not talk very well, or they do not Braille very well.

As an example, this morning, I am not sure how good the slides were, but in a way I am hoping they were not very good because I have not got a clue what was on those slides. In the same way, often when I go into the Internet, there is plenty of stuff there that I will be oblivious of because it cannot be represented in a form that my specialist software can reproduce to me.

So, I appreciate the work that is being done, and I do not want to be negative, but visually impaired people can lose out very heavily when everything is based on what you can see, because what you see is what you get. We get nothing. Thank you.

KEITH LAWTON: Thank you for your question. I do appreciate and understand your situation. Yes, there is something that needs to be done.

There are a number of packages that are being developed. In fact, interestingly enough, in the Financial Times this morning, there is an article about voice-to-text services. I know that is a side issue from what you have just said. You are talking about the websites and the information that they give you, or the inability to get the information that you need. This is an area we are looking at, but we need to look at it in more detail.

It is also an industry-wide issue. It is an issue across many industries in terms of websites. It is something we are working on, but I do not have an instant answer today for you. I am sorry, but the broadband technology is racing along, and I think it was something Tony Shipley said at the beginning, about inclusion. Your point is valid. It is about do you jump on board now and start to steer that industry, or do we wait and then do a retrofit. So, yes point taken

STEVE TYLER: I am hoping it is a partial answer to something that Karl just raised. In a sense, although some of the issues can be dealt with through broadband connectivity, the kind of issues that Karl is talking about, at least partially, are to do with web design and so on, and I would encourage him to take part in the web accessibility initiative www/org/ai. If you want to make a difference, it is the one area in the standards world where disabled people do have a seat at the table, and you can have yours if you go on to that site.

STEPHEN TYLER: Can I ask you if you have a broadband connection here to let us see some of the applications you have been talking about and perhaps even try them? It might be a useful step forward.

KEITH LAWTON: I would have to ask Stephen Speed, as it is his area. We have not brought any applications with us.

STEPHEN TYLER: The question is why is there no broadband connection in the conference centre?

STEPHEN SPEED: I do not know, is the answer to that!

NEW SPEAKER: Can we get a sense of the cost of the Telecare project?

KEITH LAWTON: We do know what the costs are, but it is in an evaluation stage, as indicated on the slide, and therefore, for us, it is commercially sensitive. There are one or two things we can do, but I am sorry it is not possible to tell you what that is at the moment.

SEAN HOPKINS: I would just like to enquire when you will initiate your multipoint visual service for language and sign language processing?

KEITH LAWTON: I cannot tell you that today. However, what I can promise is that I will see you afterwards, I will get your e-mail address and come back to you with an answer on that.

RUTH MYERS: Sign language processing. Can you tell us more about that?

KEITH LAWTON: All I can tell you is that, at the moment, it is something we are doing as part of our research, and really that is as much as we are prepared to say at the moment about it, but we are doing something in terms of research.

A couple of years ago, I went to Stockholm to look at sign language then. The Swedes were using ISDN, which is a much slower link, a videophone link, for sign language. What you will find with broadband is that, because it is a higher speed and therefore you can get a higher quality or better definition of picture and movement, the sign language will be easier to understand. We are on our way.

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