Guy Kewney

This is the wired world. It's important that you bear this fact in mind. There's this nice landscape gardener, living in the south of Spain, who did €200-worth of work for my wife. High tech it wasn't: he was digging a drain and, of course, he wanted to be paid.

Now, you can go down to the post office and buy €200. If you happen to be in Spain any time after that, you can carry the euros in your pocket and give them to the drain digger.

But this is the wired world. There has to be a better way of transferring money than buying a plane ticket and flying to Spain. The obvious thing to do is to pay the money directly into his bank account.

The 'European Monetary Union' seems to have issued a waiver to banks. In effect, the banks have to transfer the money, for which they charge a fee, which is, very roughly, €20.

There are, of course, companies like Western Union and MoneyGram. I asked them how much it costs to transfer the money and I was told "about €20".

In the end, I went to the post office. I bought €200 over the counter, put them in an envelope and posted it. Insurance on the envelope cost me £5.

Of course, it takes the best part of a week to carry a piece of paper to the sorting office, then to the airport, then to the sorting office, then to my friend the gardener. Well, obviously.

Here's the interesting thing, though: it takes almost exactly the same time to transfer it by wire. OK, you're getting the idea, I hope.

There has to be a reason why Japanese citizens have broadband at 10Mbps costing less than €20 a month while we, in 'broadband Britain', are lucky to get half a megabit and have to pay substantially more per month. It's not the technology, silly; it's the vested interests.

Recently, a Scottish ISP got in touch with me. It serves a very rural community and the demand for high-speed internet access (high-speed by UK standards, not Japanese) is becoming strong.

However, there are standards. In order to install the right equipment (that out-of-date ADSL gear, only half a megabit, remember?) in the local exchange, BT requires a certain number of people to commit to taking ADSL services.

My friend discovered it could be done with fewer people, using wireless. He went to the local villages and rounded up people who were prepared to club together to install a shared leased line, with wireless to distribute it around the community.

The trick isn't simple, technically. It involves setting up a self-configuring mesh of PCs - something a lot of people regard as advanced R&D - using a thing called Meshbox from Locustworld.

But in implementation terms, it's incredibly simple because the Meshbox does it all automatically. Each Meshbox is just a cheap PC with a built-in Wi-Fi wireless. It starts up, looks for another Meshbox, creates a link and asks the other one for any links it has.

The economics are pretty simple, too: each box costs around £250. That's your neighbourhood network created, plus your own local Wi-Fi access point.

All you need is enough other people to justify the shared cost of importing something like satellite broadband or a fibre connection to the rest of the world. It turns out you can do it easily with 100 households and some can do it with as few as 20.

Much easier than getting BT to install ADSL. Except there seems to be another law applying: that is, as soon as the required number of users is signed up, somehow the number of people you need for an ADSL upgrade to the exchange gets revised.

As my friend at the ISP found, once he had critical mass in any community, that community was suddenly able to justify ADSL in the phone network.

This isn't an isolated example either. It seems that the cost of installing the stuff is prohibitive until there's a risk of losing profitable business.

I suspect the same goes for banking. Banks could, as we all know, transfer money from London to Malaga in a millisecond, for an incremental cost of around 50 cents. But there's no risk of losing the profitable racket, so they charge what the market will stand.

In the case of broadband, we get just as much bandwidth as the providers can get away with, until such time as new technologies come along.

We're promised 3G wireless soon - this year, in fact. We're promised WiMax - next year, 2006 or maybe 2007. There are airships with antennae, even tethered balloons. They could be deployed this year, but they won't be.

Not until something actually looks like a threat will anybody roll out a technology which will justify an expensive upgrade.

I wouldn't mind, but why do the authorities keep pretending that they're pushing to make Britain a world leader in the internet?

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