Carrier pigeons disenfranchised by internet and email

The rapacious advance of technology has claimed the jobs of more innocent victims: 400 pigeons.

The Orissa state pigeon carrier service in India is cruelly sacking two-thirds of its winged workforce because of the increasing use of the internet and email.

A spokesman for the pigeon carrier service said: "We are going to retrench the pigeons to save the 5.4m rupees (£78,000) we spend annually on them."

Fear not: the practice of "retrenching pigeons" has nothing to do with ovens and pastry. The dole-birds will be handed over to the state's wildlife department, bless their little feathers.

It's time now to return to a particularly chewy bone of contention: broadband access in the UK.

Last February, the government announced that it was going to allocate £30m to stimulate the country's broadband market, particularly in the more remote regions.

This week, ecommerce minister Douglas Alexander unveiled how he plans to spend it. Well, sort of.

Scotland has been given the largest slice - £4.4m. The south west gets £3.8m, the east £3.2m and Yorkshire and Humberside £3.1m. Other areas get smaller handouts.

It's up to the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) in those areas to work out exactly how to spend the cash.

The news provoked some interesting response from our readers, particularly those who reside in Scotland.

One quite rightly pointed out that Scotland is actually rather large and, given that it contains the odd sizable conurbation, hardly qualifies as a remote region.

True enough. But the precise breakdown of where your £4.4m is going wasn't part of the government briefing, and it should be obvious that as far as we London-based media types are concerned, nowhere outside the capital matters. But sorry for any offence caused to non-remote Scots.

You should count yourselves lucky though: imagine what the Welsh and Northern Irish had to say about getting less cash than you...

So why did Scotland get the biggest grant? One reader suggests we put that to Douglas Alexander, MP for Paisley South, or his sister, who's MP for Paisley North and e-minister for the Scottish Parliament.

While the government should (grudgingly) be applauded for allocating this money (and indeed for giving broadband content providers tax breaks - see http://www.silicon.com/a48158 ), we're not quite sure what the RDAs are supposed to do with it.

BT has been making much of the fact that demand for DSL hasn't been as great as it anticipated. When it says that, it's not just talking about you and I sitting at home kicking our 56K modems in frustration as we try to download the latest Lord of the Rings trailer (or whatever rocks your boat).

It's also referring to the lack of demand being shown by its competitors who, one by one, are pulling out of the unbundling process and will not be offering competing DSL services as a result.

That lack of demand is partly explained by the economic downturn, but of equal significance is that it's simply not profitable for anyone to provide broadband in sparsely populated parts of the country. And it probably never will be.

You can blame BT and/or Oftel for making it prohibitively difficult and expensive for companies to gain access to the local loop, or to resell BT's own DSL offerings.

Energis, the latest company to withdraw from the unbundling process, certainly pointed the finger at BT - see http://www.silicon.com/a48012 . The cable companies who bypass the whole local loop problem aren't too keen to put down infrastructure either. The maths simply doesn't work.

But whatever the rights and wrongs of that debate, the RDAs now have the unenviable task of using comparatively small sums to encourage companies to set up DSL services in areas from which they stand little chance of making any money, unless we poor, put-upon users are prepared to pay reasonably significant amounts for broadband access - and the signs are that we're not.

(The government's plans for broadband are outlined here: http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk/publications/reports/broadband/index.htm . The report might take a while to download though...)

BT didn't really help the situation this week by accidentally highlighting the limitations of ADSL. It has decided that heavy users of its services are spoiling the party for everyone else by degrading network performance. Bandwidth-hungry P2P applications are a particular problem.

BTopenworld sent an email to its customers last weekend, saying: "Our traffic analysis has shown that a small percentage of customers using P2P applications use up a very large percentage of the available bandwidth, to the detriment of the majority of customers who use the network for normal browsing, email and gaming."

It continued: "In response, in the short term we have had to impose traffic controls on particular applications and ports to ensure that our customers retain their great internet experience. In the near future we will be launching a new service with a network configuration more suitable for particular bandwidth-hungry activities such as peer-to-peer communications, at a price that fairly reflects their usage of the network."

You could argue that that's exactly what people thought they were paying for with ADSL. (It's certainly true that BT denied it had a problem with this in the first place, until a concerted effort by users who had seen download rates plummet managed to persuade the company that there was something amiss.)

So, what's the solution? Tricky one that, although Tim, an IT manager and silicon.com reader, posted an open letter to BT at the bottom of one of our stories this week which ends with an interesting suggestion. We'll leave you with the whole message, because it sums up the whole debacle rather nicely.

"Dear BT, Having waited over a year to get your ADSL services installed, I must apologise for actually using it. I obviously haven't read the manual properly. It must have a clause in it that I've missed describing how I can, or rather can't, use my 512K bandwidth. Evidently I shouldn't expect to use it too much else, God forbid, I would be 'hogging' the network and nobody else would be able to use the system.

"Something to do with contention ratios I've been told. Basic maths really, if everyone has access to the same 2MB pipe with a contention ratio of 50:1 that gives me only 40K of bandwidth if everyone else is online, so simple. Now this is silly, why would anyone buy an always-on service and then stay online and try and download big files at higher speed then your massively overpriced ISDN service, I ask you? I must be mad.

"No really, I should have guessed that if I wanted to download files or stream video across my link I should have paid you guys at least ten times more money so I had a service that was really reliable and didn't stop anyone else from using the internet.

"Oh. I forgot, I tried that and it was pants too, which is why we're not relying on BT for ISDN services either. Well I always thought that paper cups and string worked well enough anyway. Yours, Tom."

Nicely put. Til next Friday...