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Rory Cellan-Jones

A Budget for broadband?

  • Rory Cellan-Jones
  • 22 Apr 09, 14:54 GMT

Earlier this week I wrote that we were still no clearer about who would pay to bring superfast broadband to every corner of the UK. But after today's Budget we are perhaps a little more clear about the way the government plans to get bog-standard broadband to places that don't have it now.

The chancellor put his weight behind the proposals in Lord Carter's interim Digital Britain report for a Universal Service Obligation for broadband. He even suggested a speed and who would pay for it. The answers? 2Mbps (not "up to" I note) and you, the BBC licence fee payer. But relax, he's worked out that there's enough money swilling around in the pot set aside to help with digital switchover.

£803m was ring-fenced from the licence fee to help people who might struggle to afford new equipment as they were obliged to switch to digital television. The National Audit Office recently calculated that as much as £250m of that might not be spent. All sorts of people were looking at that money and licking their lips, but it looks as though it will now be transformed into the Broadband Switchover Fund.

But there are still a few questions to be answered. The chancellor said in his speech that the aim was to reach "virtually" everyone by 2012. Right now, depending on whose figures you believe, just 1% of the country - or around 250,000 homes - cannot get broadband access. So who will still be left out after 2012?

Then there is that 2Mbps - will that be enough to count as broadband by 2012 when around half the country will have access to 40Mbps or more?

And finally - is £250m really enough? I suppose that depends on what kind of technology is employed. A friend who knows about these things told me the other day that covering the country with Wimax masts - which should supply 2Mbps - would only cost £750m, and you'd think there would be enough of a commercial market in Wimax to cover the shortfall.

In any case, the government says that any extra cost could be met through "additional funding mechanisms", whatever they may be.

In short, it does look as though we've taken a significant step towards universal broadband coverage. Now all we need to do is sort out who will pay for the next generation network the government says is even more vital for our economic future.

Darren Waters

Can Second Life regulate virtual sex?

  • Darren Waters
  • 22 Apr 09, 12:23 GMT

Second Life is planning to clean up its act and the question is: can the 3D virtual world survive without its, ahem, hardcore audience?

It was once the most talked-about web development on the planet, but it has gone very quiet of late.

secondlife.jpgAfter the gold rush of companies seeking to establish virtual premises in the 3D world, many have now pulled out or left their digital empires to mothball.

The BBC was not immune to its charms: Radio 1 established an island for listening to the station and live events and a virtual Jeremy Paxman once hosted Newsnight from the 3D space.

The Daily Telegraph's Rupert Neate wrote an interesting article about its demise last month.

Reuters used to have a Second Life correspondent, but he has now been sent on more tangible assignments.

Eric Krangel told the Telegraph:

"The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life)."

Second Life has always been an "anything goes" environment. But the tawdry Sin City is about to get cleaned up.

Linden Lab, the firm behind Second Life, is about to enter the world of "regulation".

Those who want to engage in the digital blending of pornographic pixels will now have to do so on a standalone "continent" built purely for such pursuits.

Users can still engage in whatever flights of fancy they have on "private land" in Second Life, but if you're up to anything naughty, you will be asked to move to the special continent.

Second Life is walking a fine line between making the virtual world more appealing to the mainstream and not alienating its core audience.

The virtual world isn't aiming to become Club Penguin, but it knows it has to do more to broaden its appeal.

And despite the fact that Second Life has dropped off the hype-meter, the company insists it is still thriving.

Last month unique "residents" with repeat logins users hit 732,526, up on the previous month and the world held a peak of about 88,000 users concurrently.

The figures may be pointing up but they remain exceedingly modest next to the successes of Facebook, with 200m users, and Twitter, with 10m users, both of which have emerged in the time it has taken Second Life to go from hot to not.

Darren Waters

Sir Tim, the web and silos

  • Darren Waters
  • 22 Apr 09, 11:44 GMT

"Web 3.0 is Web 2.0 without the silos," Tim Berners-Lee has told the World Wide Web 2009 conference in Madrid.

My colleague Roberto Belo is live tweeting the event on his personal Twitter account here.

So what does Sir Tim mean when he talks about silos? Well, I guess he's referring to a web in which moving your data between sites and web applications is more of a hope than a reality.

From your photographs on Flickr, to your status updates on Facebook and the bespoke maps you've made using Google this kind of data remains, by and large, locked into the service you originally used.

There are solutions, such as Open Social and Facebook Connect, which let you share some data across sites.

But these remain silos - they may well be welcoming people to join with open arms but they remain partial answers because of the very fact Facebook Connect and Open Social do not talk to each other at a data level.

But this isn't just about "content", such as messages and photos, but also the underlying semantic data which underpins our activity online; data that should also be able to move freely around our web journeys.

Why is it not possible to take data from one website and have a completely different website understand what it is and know what to do with it?

For example, if I am using my online banking service and am entering details of a planned single payment in the future, why can't my online calendar read that data and automatically enter details of the transaction into my diary?

Right now this does not happen because the underlying architecture of the data does not yet exist on the web.

This so-called Semantic Web is only now being built and in order for it to succeed it must be open, Sir Tim has stressed.

He is supporting the Linked Data Open Movement, part of which is a set of agreed standards but also agreements around so called Uniform Resource Identifiers.

These URIs are a common standard which allow us to describe the world of things - from people to objects - in a way machines can understand and make use of.

Sir Tim told the conference: "We are at the beginning of a much bigger future. Build a platform for others that follow, do not assume what they will use it for"

Sir Tim also took questions at the conference and has once again expressed his opposition to ISPS using their role as a gateway to the web and the net, as a chance to mine commercial revenue from user activities while online.

"It's key that ISPs provides with clean connection to the web, no snooping, no discrimination; like a water company provides water."

For ISPs such as BT, Virgin and Talk Talk who are thinking of doing exactly that - the message is clear.

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