Somewhere in a cardboard box in the garage that I’ll
be starting to tidy as you read this is an article with one of those “how could
he be so stupid?” statements.
Yes, it’s by me, written in the middle of the 1990s
for a telecoms magazine – sorry, can’t remember which one – about the innovations
that the multichannel cable TV industry was going to bring to the world.
This was in the era when the only innovation the cable
TV industry had delivered by then was more and more channels: movies, MTV and round-the-clock
news, mainly, with quite a bit of sport.
In Europe, that meant we were no longer limited to three
or four channels (only one if you were Danish). In North America it meant you could
see TV without the fading and interference that nearly obliterated the pictures
of those who lived more than a short way outside the big cities.
There was this new thing called the internet and email.
Well, not exactly new, but new as a consumer product.
I was a bit of an early adopter, having in 1985 got
a dial-up email system called Telecom Gold, a rebranding by BT of a US offering
called Dialcom. I used a Brother keyboard with a scrolling screen that had a single
line about 80 characters long, and it was connected to the network via a
separate acoustic coupler, which snugly held a regular landline phone that send
and received signals at only 300bps.
As a bonus, for people without email Telecom Gold could
send messages to companies’ telex machines. I used to do a regular column for Computing
magazine, and in 1986 wrote my piece on a train trip to visit a high-tech company,
and borrowed one of their phones to whizz it from my device into the office telex
machine. The people at the company I was visiting were, surprisingly, amazed by
this technological wizardry. (I was visiting with a film crew making this programme for the UK’s
Channel 4.)
By this time, friends in the academic world had been
using email for years. One, a scientist, had been using her account to conduct an
international love affair, until she discovered her lover got his secretary to print
out all her passionate messages so he could read them offline.
I connected properly to the internet in 1995 with the
arrival of Windows 95 from Microsoft, which had belatedly added a browser, reversing
an alleged decision by Bill Gates that there was no future in it. I had a plug-in
modem that ran at, I think, 22kbps and I used it on the family’s old fax line. Just
like telex, fax was becoming an obsolescent technology.
Back to that embarrassingly wrong mid-1990s prediction.
It was about an innovation called DOCSIS, an acronym – yes, you can call it an acronym,
because you can pronounce it as a word – for “data over cable service interface
specification”.
When DOCSIS 1.0 arrived it could deliver data at 40Mbps,
but in those pre-release days people were hoping for a modest 1Mbps.
That, coincidentally, was also the speed at which video
engineers were aiming for digitally compressed TV signals, using something called
MPEG – which stood for “motion picture experts’ group”. One of the unintended consequences
of MPEG was .mp3, the file format that still permits compressed digital audio –
podcasts for example, as well as music – on our portable devices.
It was also the speed at which telecoms equipment companies
were aiming for a new technology called asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL)
services, to carry digital signals – they thought of them as fast – into your home
down a copper line that had been intended to conduct no more than a 3kHz voice signal.
It really was clever.
So back in those mid-1990s, 1Mbps was the future. It
was going to be the blazingly hot international digital superhighway that would
deliver entertainment and education to our homes – and allow us to work from anywhere.
Peter Large, one of my technology journalist contemporaries, speculated in his book,
the Micro Revolution, that you’d be able to work while walking your dog along a
beach.
So I was pleased by that advance briefing about DOCSIS,
the technology that would soon deliver 1Mbps into my home. I wrote about it excitedly
for an article.
And then came my mistake. No one can think of any need
for speeds faster than that into the home, I blithely wrote in that article, now
thankfully hidden away in the archives of whatever magazine it was, if it’s still
in business, and – shamingly – in the carbon copy of the typed-up manuscript in
my garage.
By the way, I’m still waiting for that DOCSIS connection.
When we moved into our house in 1989, just as eastern Europe was turning from oppression
to democracy, I contacted BT to order two extra phone lines – one for a work phone
and one for a fax line – in addition to the residential line we’d taken over. The
company did so, remarkably quickly.
But I also contacted Michael Storey, then head of corporate
affairs at Vidéotron, the company with the cable TV franchise for our area – it
was based just down the road from me, in Lewisham, with satellite dishes still on
the roof 35 years later. I wanted to know when his Canadian-owned company would
be installing cable, so I could get my order in early.
“Next year,” said Storey confidently. And a year later
he said the same; and the year after that, too.
He then moved on from Vidéotron, first to run the UK
arm of Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS), which was taken over by WorldCom, and later
to be CEO of Inmarsat, where he was famous for puffing on giant cigars long after
smoking in offices had become illegal.
Three decades on, Virgin Media, into which Vidéotron
was absorbed and which now runs that Lewisham network operations centre, still hasn’t
installed cable down my street.
If it had, I’d be looking at – what’s the latest version?
– DOCSIS 4.0, offering up to 10Gbps downstream. Fat chance.
BT’s Openreach, bless them, does fibre-to-the-cabinet,
which might well be blazingly fast at the actual cabinet, but that is 200m down
the road from me. And, as I’ve already said, from there to here is the copper line
that I watched being installed when we moved in. So, the digital superhighway revolution
has still eluded me: 54.8Mbps downstream, 18.1Mbps up. It does its job, except when
it’s raining and it slows down or goes off entirely. Copper wire isn’t very good
when it’s wet.
So, I’m off. That’s why I’m not
at International Telecoms Week this week. I’ll be 72 later this month, so I’ve
decided to take not-quite-so-early retirement. I need to sort out three decades
of clutter, so we can move to somewhere more appropriate for a couple in their
70s. I will be back – somewhere – later in 2024.
But, for now, I’m part of the great resignation. Bye,
but see you next year.
