THE BROADBAND APARTHEID
For better or worse, the internet changed all our lives for ever. Yet, disgracefully, thousands of homes and businesses in vast swathes of this country are STILL condemned to life in the digital dark ages
It is easy, now, to forget that as recently as the early Sixties Scotland was an extraordinarily old-fashioned, grimy and inefficient country. Glasgow, with thousands upon thousands of belching chimneys, was infamous for winter smog. Its subway ran – and, until the late Seventies, would continue to run – with venerable, wooden Victorian carriages.
there was no Clyde tunnel, nor a Forth Road Bridge, though few noticed as Scotland then had no motorways. It took you at least five hours to drive from Edinburgh to Inverness, and travel up the West Coast necessitated the use of now largely forgotten ferries – Erskine or Renfrew, Ballachulish, Kylesku.
the fleet of David MacBrayne Ltd could only carry cars by slinging them aboard, one at a time, by crane; the first drive-on ships only materialised in 1964.
And – counter-intuitively – though there were then far fewer cars, there were annually many more fatal road accidents than there are now: there were no speed limits or seat belts and, until 1966, no effective drink-driving legislation.
telephone calls had to be made through your local exchange (caller plugged into caller by girls apt to listen in avidly) and we had only two grainy, monochrome television channels, broadcasting largely in the evening and closing at a respectable hour with the strains of the national anthem.
HALF a century later, we are quite transformed – a land of sleek roads, modern trains, bustling Hebridean car ferries and marvellous new bridges, subscriber trunk dialling and mobile phones. It has never been so easy to move around or to communicate within our little land, and it has never been safer.
But in one respect too many Scots are still inconvenienced and hobbled – by slow, unreliable or fitful broadband service.
Posterity will look back to these years around the turn of the current century and justly hail the advent of the internet as the biggest cultural revolution since the invention of the printing press – transforming, and with bewildering speed, in barely 20 years the way we all relate to each other and to the world around us.
It has already laid waste entire industries, from video rental to high street travel agencies. Shops of all sorts have given up the ghost against the relentless might of Amazon. My own industry – that of newspapers – has still not figured out how either to monetise the internet or compete with it, and in 20 years has shed untold millions in advertising revenue.
the internet has opened extraordinary possibilities, allowed the invention of completely new crimes. Our children can research geography homework or a history essay without ever opening a book – or, potentially, view the most appalling pornography.
It has changed the way most of us work, allowed many of us to live in remote and rural Scotland while holding down a range of creative jobs, delivering products or services online to people we rarely need to meet.
From Facebook through WhatsApp to Snapchat, too, it has transformed the way we socialise, and we are just beginning to grasp how such platforms are changing our politics. With only the traditional media (and its assorted filtering, controlling elites) we would never have voted for Brexit and Donald trump could not have won the presidency.
But the infrastructure through which we email and browse and download has struggled, at times hopelessly, to keep up with demand and with, at times, the bewildering changes in technology.
the iPhone, for instance, has recently celebrated its tenth birthday and practically every teenager seems to have such a smartphone.
Around 2000, most households had a single fat desktop computer at which you took turns (by the clunky dial-up internet of the time) to check your emails or read very basic news.
today, a typical household will have a couple of laptops, perhaps a tablet computer or two and certainly three or four smartphones, and we think nothing of downloading entire television programmes. (I sit eagerly down, at my convenience, one evening each week to see the latest episode of the revived twin Peaks.)
that is a lot of demand and we all know, with a scowl, there are times of the day when broadband will move like treacle – around four o’clock, when the children on your street will come home from school and immediately dash onto the web.
But nothing matches that sinking feeling – the utter, disorientating horror – when there is no broadband at all, as happens far too often in the Western Isles. On occasion my service has been down for two or three days.
You feel unutterably cut off from the world. You envisage emails of life-changing importance hanging out there in cyberspace, joyous Facebook banter unfolding without you, governments collapsing and presidents shot and you in all ignorance unless you put on the tV…
THE day’s work must be printed off onto actual paper before you proceed ignominiously into town in search of one of the few surviving fax machines – and even such dispiriting inconvenience is as nothing compared to the plight of parents.
‘If broadband goes down in our home,’ confides a colleague, ‘you’d think it was the
end of the world for the children if they become detached from the umbilical cord of their iPad.’
This all seems particularly unfair when you consider that the giants of the broadband world charge the same for their ‘service’ whether you live in Durness or Dundee (which just happens to be the only Scottish place in the top five areas in the UK for broadband speed).
The internet is today more important to the life and economy of Scotland than the River Clyde or the railway network. It particularly matters because the creative sector is now a huge part of that economy (in just one diverting detail, cool Scottish geeks lead the world in the invention, design and development of computergames) and because of, by European standards, our very low population density.
The vast majority of Scots now live in the Central Belt, along or near the M8 corridor.
In 1745 a quarter of us lived in the Highlands and islands; today fewer than a tenth do, and in many parts of it there are very few people at all.
The North Harris medical practice, to give just one example, covers a land mass bigger than Edinburgh.
Experts talk of the ‘rural penalty’ – the costs, inconveniences and unnerving isolation if you live far from a town or city, felt all the more given our generally dreich weather.
The internet has quite transformed quality of life in such places. It allows people like me to make a decent living, far from the city and its movers and shakers, and thus supports young families and brings in valuable income, with all that entails for local shops and school rolls.
It is still more vital in attracting people to make new lives in such areas. It is not all doom and gloom: the Outer Hebrides, for instance, has local schools and healthcare the equal of any in Britain.
You can usually see your GP on the same day you make an appointment; the air is most clean, the scenery ravishing, the community kindly and crime minimal.
‘Creative people are attracted to certain features of environments,’ experts last September concluded in a paper on broadband for the Journal of Rural Studies.
‘For many it is the promise of natural amenities, rich cultural heritage, a strong sense of community and a better quality of life that inspires relocation to rural settings.
‘Yet this notion of a rural idyll is tempered by challenges that rural creative practitioners face. They are remote from the central hubs of activity and their professional networks and it is not easy to maintain visibility in one’s sector. Added to this are the challenges faced by rural inhabitants and workers more generally…
‘Rural areas, remote rural areas in particular, are also characterised by poor broadband infrastructure, something that impacts negatively on businesses, unfortunate given the potential of technologies to alleviate the rural penalty.’
‘Ninety-eight per cent of the land mass of Scotland is considered rural, whereas urban areas account for 82 per cent of the population but only 2 per cent of the land mass. This is concerning given that broadband connectivity is problematic in many rural and suburban areas – precisely those areas that are typically targeted by “lifestyle” in-migrants including those based in the creative industries.’
For, indeed, Scotland’s broadband has failed lamentably to keep up. According to a recent report, the three worst-connected local authority regions in the United Kingdom – in terms of the slowest broadband speeds – are all in Scotland: Orkney, Shetland and Highland.
The national ‘floor’ – as decreed by government in London; the minimal broadband speed your service provider must lay – is 10 megabytes per second, the minimum that will support the normal needs of a typical family, including a small business done from home.
Orcadians endure only 6.3 MBps. Shetland has 8.4 MBps; Highland 8.8. The Western Isles fare little better on 9.1 MBps. Of the top five regions in the United Kingdom – those boasting the most rapid connectivity – only one, the city of Dundee, is in Scotland; and within all those regions (and others) there is much local variation.
Twenty per cent of Scottish households, it is ascertained, have poor to no broadband service at all – and all this against the startling truth that, across the United Kingdom as a whole, the average household broadband speed is 22.8 MBps, over twice that officially specified floor.
And spare a thought for residents of Corrie Road, Kinlochleven: as of October 2015 they suffered speeds of 0.985 MBps.
The Scottish Government, when it has not been absorbed in independence referendums or whingeing about Brexit, has been trying to address this – and, sensibly, in partnership with business rather than the sort of big-state public sector initiative so apt (such as the notorious Edinburgh trams project) to go horribly wrong. In partnership with BT Openreach, Digital Scotland began its roll-out in April 2014, and within six months the £410million programme had provided superfast fibre broadband to 150,000 premises the length of the country. By November, engineers had laid 188 miles of sub-sea cable and 1,500 miles of cable on land – enough to stretch from Shetland to Land’s End and back again and installed around 600 new street cabinets for many private properties.
‘We are still in the early stages,’ purred the then new First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, ‘but already thousands of Scottish homes and businesses are able to take advantage and sign up. They simply wouldn’t have had access to highspeed technology without this ambitious partnership project.
‘It’s fundamental to the Scottish Government’s aim to deliver world class connectivity by 2020, enabling people across Scotland to connect any time, any place, anywhere using any device.’
AND now, in one extraordinary deal, desperate residents in two remote Highland hamlets have agreed personally to dig in new sections of fibre cable spurs directly to their homes – BT Openreach meeting all costs, but they contributing their own labour.
They are tenants on the private Altnaharra estate, in the heart of lonely Sutherland, and Skerray on the county’s north coast – 145 homes in all. Hard, wet work for the crofters involved, but by this autumn they will enjoy broadband at 330 MBps for their pains – at present, it is a crawling 0.5.
Kinlochleven has now, at last, been given superfast fibre broadband, but that is of scant consolation to Alison Grieve, whose Loch Leven Seafood Café is several miles away and where broadband speeds are ‘horrendously slow’.
‘I have just been apologising to my staff as I have only just managed to pay their wages, and I had to go home to my house to do it, as I have had no internet here for two days.
‘I live not far away and the speeds there are very slow, but it doesn’t go down. When it is working the speed is so slow and makes things like banking very difficult…’
The authorities are not prepared to extend the roll-out to her lonely spot, four miles east of Ballachulish, and – with other residents in the wider Glencoe area – Alison Grieve is now resigned to an expensive satellite solution.
‘Digital is transforming the way we live,’ enthused Finance Secretary Derek Mackay in March. ‘It is connecting us faster than ever before while putting more power into the hands of service users…’
For Alison Grieve and very many other Scots, even now, these are but fair, fine words, ringing very hollow.