Broadband
In Second Sight, (Online, June 14) Azeem Azhar says "we have such low broadband penetration because there isn't a compelling reason to pay for a connection."
There are many reasons and they will vary from user to user. Azeem lists some of them, but I would like to say what they are.
1) Freedom from problems connecting when checking email and web browsing.
2) No meter running in the background -"free" dial-up connections are mainly a thing of the past.
3) The ability to download large updates to your operating system quickly, and download game demos, which would have been almost impossible before.
4) The relative ease with which a broadband connection can be shared between a couple of PCs.
5) Access to foreign radio as streaming media.
6) Streaming video becomes watchable: Big Brother; one-off events such as the Madonna concert; Nasa TV which has a 300kbps feed.
7) The constant connection means that email is delivered with less delay, and it is fast to open a web page to look for simple things, eg phone numbers via <A HREF="http://www.yell.com"
I" TARGET="_NEW">www.yell.com
I think if you spoke to users of broadband they would consider the advantages to be more than marginal over 56kbps dial-up modems.
One of the major reasons that broadband doesn't have a high penetration is the lack of information published in the media that is accurate and the lack of advertising from the service providers.
The usual criticism thrown back is that the ADSL/cable rollouts are in disarray. I will not deny that there are problems, but most basic installation problems are sorted now. The whole broadband arena is not as dark as lots of people would like it to be portrayed.
Andrew Ferguson
www.adslguide.org.uk
In Second Sight, Azeem Azhar says: "Five years on, and - with the exception of South Korea - residential broadband access has failed to even start taking off."
Don't forget Sweden. While writing this in Stockholm, I'm listening to BBC Radio 4's Today and downloading from Napster (non-copyright, of course) and viewing the Guardian, all at the same time via my housing cooperative's DSL connection at 10MHhz per apartment.
Sweden is connecting to broadband at a rate of knots which you would not believe. Housing co-ops and public housing all offer connection to broadband and already about 30% have it. The cost per household? I pay 200 SEK per month (about £ 27).
Jim Heckle
jim.heckle@runo.se
I'm sorry Azeem Azhar takes such a jaundiced view of broadband access. It has transformed the way our household uses the internet and I can almost believe the internet hype now. All that audio and video streaming we read about does actually work, most of the time.
We have a Mac and a PC connected to NTL's 512kbps service via a router and I would not return to a 56k dial-up. The cost? £24.99 per month including the modem. A bonus? My telephone line is free for making telephone calls! Unless you have two phone lines, a "free" or "unlimited" dial-up service is not much use.
Roger Shufflebottom
rogershuff@ntlworld.com
There may still be some ideas about ADSL that crave comment. Yes, you can connect a PC or two, plus a phone to one telephone line with ADSL (Feedback, June 14). But why wait for ADSL? I have two Linux boxes and a Mac happy talking down the line via a 56k modem (with a five-port Ethernet hub - room for two more!) What about the calls? Well, we have two lines you see_
Another thing. Azeem Azhar's ADSL crystal ball seems to omit the biggest "killer" (not "killer app"), which is the projected growth in viruses in the next few years. If you are "always on", then you are always at risk.
Do you really need 512k all day and all night, and does the extra cost really make sense for the domestic user?
Gordon Joly
gordon.joly@pobox.com
Azeem Azhar claims that "56kbps is pretty good for most needs", and that there's no need for faster access. So why do I know so many people who gave up on the internet after the 56K experience?
I pay £25 a month for 512/128K broadband, £7 a month more than the Guardian tells me is standard for unmetered 56K access, and those friends using it who'd previously given up on the internet have had their interest reinvigorated. The difference even reading the Guardian online is huge, let alone for mailing large attachments to and fro. I couldn't disagree more!
James Mackenzie
james@mackenzie.nu
E -lected
Paul Smee (E-vote of no confidence, June 14) questions the ability to hold a secure electronic election in which no one can vote more than once, but the authorities don't know how each person voted. In fact, there are many election protocols that fulfil these criteria. The simplest (conceptually) involves anonymously assigning eligible voters a unique voter ID (there are suitable algorithms for this, eg ANDOS).
Each vote consists of the voter's ID and their choice. The authorities can't correlate a voter ID with a person, and a duplicate voter will necessarily use the same ID. The election results are published along with all corresponding voter IDs for each choice. This allows the final count to be independently verified, and individual voters can check that their vote was correctly categorised. Bruce Schneier gives a good overview of this, and other secure election protocols in Applied Cryptography.
Steven Martin
stevepmartin@ntlworld.com
Easy tiger
Thanks a lot for two paragraphs in Webwatch (June 14) about Tigerchild, a website offering "high-level material" (on particle physics? naval architecture? sonata form?) and is slow to load. Far too slow, clearly, for Online to hang around long enough to describe its contents adequately. Or were we supposed to deduce from the disclosure that "two mums" produced it that only women will be interested, anyway? Michael McCarthy
michaelmccar75@hotmail.com
