The ISP industry only has itself to blame for its bad reputation – Guest Editorial

Now partly this is because every cellular radio tower needs supplying with high bandwidth fixed line connectivity, which is expensive. Obviously it’s about practical reasons such as geography, population density and land ownership.

But now you can’t move for reports that 5G is going to be the panacea. Ultra low latency, ultra high bandwidth. Where’s the catch? Oh yes – it can struggle to go through walls and cover long distances.

Unless there is a revolution in not only femtocell technology (where we end up with essentially millions of smaller cells instead of larger community towers), but also in the provision of high bandwidth, resilient connections to those cells, 5G will just be another failed promise.

Another example of hype coupled with a complete lack of realism.

Can we just blame the marketing and hype?

Part of me would love to just blame the marketing departments of the big ISPs (the smaller ones generally assuming they have to follow suit), but this is to over simplify the problem.

This issue runs far deeper than that. It includes journalists, analysts, regulators and elected officials.

You can’t blame an engineer for getting excited about a new technology and wanting to talk about it. But without learning from history (and a very recent history it is), we continue to fall into the same traps year after year. We damage our entire industry and foster mistrust from our customers.

What can the industry do to save itself?

The answers? I wish I had them all. Now that we’ve come this far it will probably take another decade to undo the harm caused by acting in this way, and that’s if every player made a concerted effort to change these practices. And we still have a national infrastructure organisation in Openreach that is still only invested in and controlled by BT. The newer fibre players have understandably focused on delivering their networks to those areas of the country most economically viable – high population densities.

The more of these the better, though. The more choice for consumers and providers competing for their business, the more those providers are forced by their customers to compete on quality and on price.

But what do we do instead? We declare “overbuild“. Why would we want more than one of these new fibre companies in this area? Isn’t that a waste of money?

But by encouraging or mandating that only one provider exist in an area, we end up in exactly the same problem as the rest of the country with a single Openreach infrastructure. All reseller ISPs that the consumer can choose from are all still beholden to a single company with a single physical network. It goes down, they all go down. It goes slow, they all go slow.

Am I just a doom monger? I hope not. let’s be clear – I want to see a free market solution to the problems of connectivity, and every time a new regulation comes along, it only enhances the position of large established players who can easily afford to comply (if anything it encourages the kind of consolidation and corporatism that politicians and the public hate), in turn creating more barriers to entry for newer, smaller companies looking to compete and therefore deliver better services to customers.

What the ISP industry needs most is realism, and to learn from history

I’m an engineer, so new technologies do excite me. But I’m also a realist.

With freedom comes responsibility and what I would like to see is more openness and a good dose of realism from everyone involved in the industry. Whether it’s being specific about being slow at peak times, or what bandwidth a connection in a given location should actually achieve, we all need to play our part in changing the perceptions of our industry in the eyes of consumers and those that govern.

We need to use English words in the way they were always intended rather than twisting their meanings, or caveating them in small print. Let’s end this Newspeak.

The new generation of products and services could help with this – but as with any new technology in the past 20 years, there is equally the danger that we repeat the same mistakes.

The new G.fast-based product from BT is up front about its guarantees, and in the compensation available to customers. Software is helping this, and more powerful CPE (customer premises equipment). Having clear, contractually defined means of testing connectivity is vital so that expectations are set, and quality is easy to prove or disprove.

Moves to encourage resilience are also welcome, helping improve connection up time and get customers through difficult, but inevitable faults. But in an age of mis-selling scandals, political uncertainty and the opportunity of increased global trade, the ISP industry needs to repair the damage it’s done.

All the software and good technological ideas in the world won’t be able to deal with, what appears to me to be, mainly a human problem. If we can open our eyes as an industry, ditch the group-think, be self-critical, learn from our recent history, and most importantly be honest and realistic, then we might just start being seen to be the solution to problems, rather than the cause.

— Nic Elliott, Chief Technology Officer, Evolving Networks.