Bay Area's broadband mess is not as bad as ours

NET RESULTS/Karlin Lillington: The situation is definitely rich in irony. But Silicon Valley residents fail to see much humour in the fact that their region is the great rumbling engine of the global technology and internet industries, yet most of them can't get a broadband internet connection.

All the equipment to build those fast internet networks, and the software to run them, may emerge out of Valley companies. But the vast region that stretches from one end of San Francisco Bay to the other has one of the lowest metropolitan penetration rates for high-speed internet connectivity in the United States.

The three biggest cities - San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland - have virtually no cable modem internet access at all, although San Jose was delighted finally to get a few thousand residents onto such a service just weeks ago.

The other mainstream alternative technology for home broadband, digital subscriber line (DSL,) is only sporadically available across the Valley. Where it can be found, potential customers have had to wait weeks or months for installation.

It's a crazy situation. Providers offering the service have aggressively advertised DSL - talk about preaching to the converted - and then have been unable to handle the breadth of consumer demand. No area of the US is more eager for broadband or better informed about what it is and why they'd like it, so running adverts for such a long-awaited and badly-wanted service, and then foot-dragging when it comes to the actual installation, is a kind of slow geek torture.

In an effort to catch up with demand, many providers have subcontracted out installation to people who sometimes seem - at best - to be student engineers. One friend described a scenario in which such hired help showed up then sat around on his floor holding various cables in their hands and looking at the back of the PC in bemusement. Not surprisingly, his DSL failed to work. He insisted that the phone people come out again, but in an official phone company van. The Bay Area broadband drought is beginning to feature regularly in newspaper editorials and the letters page of the region's daily newspapers. And now, the region's leaders have begun to view the situation with some embarrassment and deepening concern. No longer is fast broadband seen as a nice perk for technology industry workers, but as a necessary element of daily social and economic life.

Technology industry figures as well as some government representatives in Washington are arguing that broadband development across the US has become so sclerotic that federal government intervention and support is needed. The push for a comprehensive national broadband policy is an interesting shift from the tech boom days, when the free market was considered to be the ultimate market driver. And it is a curious move, given the libertarian leanings of the tech industry as a whole.

Nonetheless, the Bay Area's broadband muddle looks pretty darn desirable compared to the situation in the Republic. Cable modem internet access - which hitches a ride on the same cable that brings multiple channels to your TV - is the dominant form of broadband internet delivery to homes in the US . It can potentially be provided to half the homes in the Bay Area - and they're complaining!

In contrast, we have so few cable modem connections in the State that they are considered negligible in international surveys such as those done by the OECD and industry lobby groups. Here, we have only the very Spartan availability of DSL - a decade-old technology that is considered second-best in the States - offered at prices close to three times the average cost in the US and Europe.

And even in those big Bay Area cities noted above that do not have much cable - San Francisco and San Jose - a fifth of households have DSL or wireless broadband connections, double the national average. A fifth! Even the notion of having one in 10 households on broadband seems an impossible hope here, where we are closer to one in 4,000.

But at least internet users can rejoice in one small piece of good news: a ridiculous lawsuit through which BT was claiming to hold the patent for that Web building block, the hyperlink, was thrown out of court a few weeks ago.

Hyperlinks - clickable areas of Web pages that transfer you to other pages - are the substance of the Web. Indeed, without them there is no Web. They were central to the vision of the Web's acknowledged inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who imagined a gigantic, interlinked global resource that could be easily used by anyone.

According to BT, it applied for the patent on the concept back in 1976, and obtained it in 1989. The company decided two years ago that it would try to collect royalties from large internet service providers who, through net connections, provide billions of hyperlinks daily to net users.

While many laughed at both the nerve and the notion of making such a claim, there was a real sense that the courts just might decide in BT's favour - especially given that so many companies are claiming their every sneeze and sniffle comes under the domain of US patent acts.

But some net pioneers - you know, the ones who never even thought of royalties or legal manoeuvring to block and limit the use of their exciting new network - emerged to argue that the concept of the hyperlink went well back before 1979.

And out went the lawsuit. So the next time you point and click, give silent thanks that some people believed, and still believe, that sheer creativity for creativity's sake should sometimes drive innovation, not the hope of a fat wallet.

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