Point of view - Cable manners

Recent news broadcasts have shown how astonishingly different perceptions of the same events can be. You know in theory how one person's war crime can be another's heroic defence of a sacred homeland, but the vehemence of contrary views can still take you aback.

I've been up against a rather more mundane example in a series of acid conversations with Cable & Wireless.

I'd found out that C&W was about to launch interactive services. It was not yet publicising the fact, but it was happy to talk about it ... up to a point.

C&W told me it would start to roll out set-top boxes equipped with cable modems on 1 July. Interactivity would at first be limited to 100 chosen sites and would spread to the wider web.

Impressive, I thought. A hundred sites exploiting the full possibilities of broadband had to be interesting, even if many were souped-up catalogues.

Then I asked: 'So what about PCs? Are we going to be able to plug PCs into the STBs? Will you be offering standalone cable modems?'

I felt like Oliver asking for more. The press officer sounded shocked, and gave me to understand that PC cable links would not be available until next year.

Eventually I got through to Martin Graham- Scott, head of broadcast communications.

He sounded hurt and angry that I should talk PCs when obviously what the market wanted was STBs.

He knew this because he had conducted a survey, including people who would never think of buying a PC, and was focusing on the bigger market.

It seemed to me that UK cable companies had taken five years to begin to catch up with what PC users had been doing on the net. All this time we had been begging them to give us broadband access. We kickstarted the revolution they were about to cash in on, and they were still ignoring us.

C&W, a telecoms company, doesn't even have the excuse that its roots are in entertainment. It ought to know better.

People will find all sorts of uses (video phones, remote surveillance) for broadband once they get it. Asking them about it now, when they have only the haziest notions of the possibilities, will hardly produce reliable answers.

I am still unclear what C&W is offering. Graham-Scott eventually emailed me to say PCs will be able to link to the STBs 'via an extra lead'.

This should not be an afterthought. Cable is part of our national infrastructure, like roads. You don't build the M1 and then tell people they can use it only in family cars built under your licence and stop them going further than the Watford Gap. Or, if you do, you should expect to hear questions raised in Parliament.

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