Broadband. It's a city thing. Although BT makes great claims for its ADSL roll-out, with around 1,000 exchanges enabled for fast internet access, in practice this excludes most rural areas. The same is true for cable internet, where the cash-strapped companies providing the service have run out of steam after hooking up areas of dense population. And even if you are connected to a DSL-enabled exchange, if you're more than five miles away - or at the end of a line with poor connections - you're out of luck.
There are alternatives - fixed wireless broadband, satellite services, even full-priced leased lines - but none is an obvious replacement for wired broadband. Fixed wireless is available now from Tele2, a Swedish telco that set up here a couple of years ago, and is on trial by most of the other major data communications companies in the country. It works in a similar way to wireless Lans: a central node or base station connected to the internet, feeding a selection of remote stations by microwave. Unlike wireless Lans, Tele2's system covers tens of kilometres from each transmitter by using higher power and better antennae: at the remote site, a wall-mounted box has to be expertly installed and pointed in the right direction.
The good news is that Tele2 has a wide variety of speeds and tariffs, starting at £40 a month for a nominal 512kbps download and 256kbps upload for a single user. Installation costs - either £149 or £199 - depend on how high the company has to mount the antenna at your end. The company also does a range of guaranteed speeds, up to 1Mbps both ways, and a variety of other services more commonly found on leased lines. The bad news is that the tariff options are so complex you need to use a calculator - found on the company's website - and that it is currently limiting its services to urban areas. However, the company has said that if a hundred businesses within any 10km radius want the service, it will install a base station there. In general, it is pitching itself as a leased-line alternative.
Satellite internet doesn't suffer from any geographical limitation. Provided from orbiting transmitters some 36,000kms above the Earth, the services cover most of Europe; providing you have line of sight to the satellite which will be to the south and east, you'll be able to get access. The system is somewhat more complex than most access methods: the satellite constantly transmits between 10-50Mbps to the whole of its coverage area, composed of thousands of interleaved replies to network requests made by the services' users.
You can either transmit your requests directly to the satellite through the same dish you use to receive the information, or send the request to the satellite's base station over an ordinary modem connected to a phone line and the dial-up internet. The latter is much cheaper to install - you only need a satellite receiver, not one with a microwave transmitter built in - but does involve phone charges and limits your upload speed to normal modem rates.
Either sort of service involves much greater delays, called latency, than other broadband options. Some of this is due to the satellite being around one-third of a second away at the speed of light, so by the time the base station has beamed up your request and the satellite retransmitted to you there's a delay of two-thirds of a second. For systems where you transmit your request to the satellite, there's the same delay again. Once your request has started to arrive, it can appear at more than a megabit a second depending on how many other requests are being served by the satellite at the same time: this sort of broadband is good for downloading large files, but not much good for streaming video, and absolutely useless for voice over IP. It's similarly hopeless for gaming, which at least means nobody will be tempted to waste company time slaughtering orcs. You also need to check planning permission.
The biggest provider of satellite internet access in the UK is BT. Its BTOpenworld Business Satellite Service (BSS) costs £900 to set up and £60 a month to run for a single user, or £1,300 setup and £120 a month for multiple users, which is the same service but with a local hub/router. Download speed is up to 512kbps, upload is up to 256kbps and is directly to the satellite. BT has announced a much cheaper telephone-line uplink system that will cost around £30 per month for 256kbps download speeds, and a £400 installation cost, but it's not yet commercially available. Tiscali, a major European ISP, is currently running a trial on the same Gilat satellite system as BTOpenworld's BSS, with roughly the same capabilities and costs.
The last option for distant broadband access is to buy in a leased line. This is a complicated and expensive business, with installation charges depending on location - but likely to be in the mid-thousands - and connect charges at around £2,000 for 128k annually. If you have some other people locally who are prepared to contribute and share costs in return for bandwidth, and have sufficient networking expertise to set up a mutual Lan, and don't worry about effectively becoming an ISP, then this could be a viable alternative.
Broadband provision outside urban areas is patchy, expensive and unsatisfactory. It may get a lot better; a number of companies, including Orange, are evaluating new fixed wireless services using a new IEEE standard, 802.16. This covers a very wide set of options, from 128kbps up to 100Mbps on many different radio bands, and perhaps most interestingly includes mesh protocols. These let each subscriber act as a relay for others, extending coverage as users connect and does not require an expensive investment in base station infrastructures by the service provider.
A great deal depends on how the market develops, and how the government liberalises radio band access and licensing conditions. We have the technology for cheap, universal broadband provision to businesses: it remains to be seen whether we have the will.
