Today’s the day when broadband access became FREE!    Yes – FREE!!! 

Quite a joke really – it’s not broadband (in the proper use of the world i.e. 2 Mbit/s both ways) and it’s certainly not FREE.  But that’s what the clever marketing guys and gals at The Carphone Warehouse in the UK have come up with.   “Free Broadband … forever”.  And this magnificent ‘free’ offer only costs a UK consumer £20.99 a month.   You can’t get much ‘free-er’ than this in this days of high living costs!   It’s like taxis promoting themselves by offering “free petrol”.  Everything is ‘free’ if you pay for it as part of something else. 

But, using access to the incumbent’s (British Telecom) unbundled local loop as a noose in which to capture consumers, with the promise that for a fixed sum every month you can have anything you want, provided its from ‘our bundle’, is swimming against the tide being created by these digital technologies of abundance.   Now that it has been independently estimated by Cache Logic of Cambridge, UK,  that over 70% of internet traffic is ‘peer-to-peer’ (P2P) - that is to say that 70% of what people are “giving and getting, selling and buying” in the way of content across the internet is NOT from their friendly ISP or phone company - its from some other person or business across town or the world.  That’s the power of the internet – the power of an open access strategy.  Unless and until citizens and their local political leaders wake up to the fact that what is needed is public policy that specifically promotes this ‘open access’ model and encourages investment in next genus fibre infrastructure that bypasses the toll booths of the 19^th century telecoms industry, then we are all in grave danger of ending up in a copper-cul-de-sac created by telco-driven DSL strategies. 

 Not only that, but when we do, all those fresh-faced ‘unbundled local loop ISPs’ will, quite rightly, be pleading with our governments to ‘leave it that way’ while they reap an adequate return on the millions they are today investing in old-hat hardware in the local exchanges of their incumbents!

The fundamentally flawed telecoms/ICT regulatory regimes around the world which are distorting the market to preserve it from the otherwise massive disruption which these technologies have the power to deliver (to the benefit of end users and economies at large) will prove very expensive indeed.

Beware!  I have read the small print in the Carphone Warehouse ‘free broadband’ offering.  It clearly states, that if you are one of the 70% discovering the power of P2P use of the internet, then this “selfish” hogging of bandwidth could ultimately lead to Carphone Warehouse suspending your account or possibly closing it!    Carphone Jailhouse I call it! 

 And when you are in the Carphone Jailhouse with the unbundled local loop around your neck – remember, it could be worse - it could have been costing you money!
No – this is a ‘drop-dead gorgeous deal’ from Charles Dunstone and his team at Carphone Warehouse and Tony Blair with his ‘broadband Britain dream’ should be proud of them!  They are certainly doing their bit to ensure Great Britain stays a nation of dumb-downloading free-loaders.