What services should be available via universal broadband?
18 August 2009
As the Panel have said repeatedly, what matters about a universal service commitment as far as consumers and citizens are concerned, is what it delivers and that this is delivered reliably. We have said that we think a new type of more interactive public service will be essential to entice some consumers to get on-line, for example. We have also said that the connection must be wide enough and reliable enough to deliver services that need 2 Mb/s - not ‘up to', but actual and guaranteed.
We recently met some internet companies (yahoo, ebay and skype) who obviously want to see that all consumers are offered a broadband connection that gives them access to as many applications and services as they choose and it is certainly true that, from a consumer and citizen perspective, access via a PC has come to mean access to anything on the Internet subject to bandwidth limitations.
This raises the question of whether the universal broadband commitment should involve a commitment to providing reliable access to all services and applications that a 2Mb connection could allow. The Panel hasn't discussed this in detail, so we don't have the answers, but here are some questions that I think are worth asking:
- Is it OK from a citizen and consumer perspective that sometimes internet providers will stop us accessing a web service because there is illegal content somewhere on the site? The answer is probably yes, but we might expect legitimately expect everyone to work to get that service up and running again (minus offending material) asap and keep us in touch with what is happening. At the moment however, it is very unclear how internet providers and web service providers work together to get things moving fast or where you or I go to get something done when a service is no longer available. There might therefore be an issue about internet and content providers working better together to serve consumers' interests?
- Is it OK that at times when lots of us want to use the internet (Sunday nights for example,) we cannot achieve the higher bandwidths we might usually get and which make video content possible to access? At the moment some internet service providers will manage the traffic on their service to ensure everyone can access a little, but none of us can access as much as we have paid for or need. This would particularly affect some bandwidth heavy services. This approach may be pragmatic when we don't yet have a reliable universal service, but perhaps it needs to be clearer to us as consumers that this is what will happen, or is happening.
- Is it OK for an internet provider to deliver access to a subset of internet services? For example is it ok for a mobile company to exclude the possibility of using any other competing internet telephone systems, or for an internet supported TV to provide access to only a limited range of websites. And if such limited access is OK, what sort of information might consumers need so as to be able to make an appropriate choice about which internet service to purchase?
- Finally, given all the above (and doubtless other) questions about access to content, what do we think should be guaranteed as part of the universal service commitment and what are we happy to leave to the market?
The Panel will doubtless need to discuss these issues over the next period, but please let us know if you have any comments.