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Is it time to stop the broadband whinging?
BT isn't a charity you know...

By editorial@silicon.com

Published: Tuesday 10 September 2002

"Our obligation is to shareholders. We are not some kind of national institution that has an obligation to bring technology to the UK. We are a for-profit organisation."

So said BT CEO Ben Verwaayen this morning in an interview with key online journalists. From his manner - not defensive exactly, but certainly robust - it was clear that this issue has cropped up time and time and again since he took over as CEO at the start of the year, and he's running out of patience dealing with the question.

As a Dutchman, he won't remember the nanny-like BT of old, the monolith that looked after our quaint red phone boxes, owned the Yellow Pages and gave us a nice range of black (and sometimes beige) phones to rent.

He's similarly unimpressed when asked to join in the finger-pointing we all love so much. He won't talk about who's to blame when it comes to the state of broadband in the UK. He's "amazed" by the amount of time and energy we all spend on it.

And in a way, he's right to think like this on both counts. Why should a commercial organisation be expected to act in the nation's best interests? You can blame the Tories for privatising BT in the first place, you can blame the current government for not putting enough pressure on BT in the early days of broadband. But you can't blame a company trying to make money for, err... trying to make money. And there really is only one way to go: forward.
So where is that exactly? Well, BT could follow the maxim that supply creates its own demand. It could go gung-ho and ADSL-enable every exchange in the country and wait for the pounds to trickle in. But if you were a shareholder, would you be happy with BT having no idea when it might see a return on such an investment? No, of course not.

Two thirds of the country already have access to broadband, which isn't too shoddy. The problem is that only nine per cent of households are currently signed-up.

So what are the laggards waiting for? Firstly, content. That's a tricky one. The media landscape is rather barren right now. The economy has forced some once-optimistic broadband content companies to close, and most to scale back their operations.

Secondly - and perhaps more importantly - there's the ingenuity of the human mind.

That's a slightly woolly concept, but Verwaayen pointed out that no one envisaged SMS being the killer data app for mobile phones. No one thought the primary use of many home PCs would be email and online chat. The same process will happen with broadband, he says. That killer app will be communications-driven - they always are - but the one for broadband hasn't been invented yet.

On top of that, he believes companies will see that broadband can make their staff more productive, and that individuals will see it can improve their lifestyle (presumably when they've invented that killer app - whatever it may be). "If you have the two together - lifestyle and productivity - then it's unstoppable," he said.

He's probably right. The only remaining issue is timescale - and whether all this will come too late.

And that's up to everyone, not BT, not Oftel, not the government - everyone. Don't worry, we're not going all soft in our old age: we will keep highlighting the very real problems in the industry (and BT's role in creating them). But maybe it's time to stop moaning, and start thinking.