Stand by for something which will radically change our lives: how we work, how we play, how we entertain ourselves - even the things we work at.
It's called broadband - jargon for very fat data pipes for homes and business - and it's going to be here, for most of us, very soon. That much was guaranteed on Tuesday when Oftel, the UK's telecommunications regulator, announced it was ending BT's monopoly over local phone lines.
The decision to open up competition on the local part of the UK's phone network means that we can now sit back and watch as BT - along with a clutch of big name companies like Telewest, NTL, Energis and aggressive US giant MCI WorldCom - race to serve up a variety of broadband technologies at consumer prices.
These new networks will be able to carry vast amounts of data, delivering movies on demand, video conferencing and the kind of super-fast internet access which will make today's BT Home Highway ISDN connections look sluggish.
Those who have used it say it will change how we use the internet, how we watch TV and how we communicate with each other. It is little wonder that David Edmonds, Oftel's Director General, is in bullish mood. Having issued his thinly veiled criticism of BT's sluggishness in responding to public demand for faster telecommunications, he is predicting the new competition will make the UK a world-leader in broadband.
"This announcement means that, if we have fallen behind other countries, we are going to overtake virtually everywhere else very quickly," he says. "I have a personal view that the UK, by the end of 2001, will have a better communications network at a local level than any other country of which I have knowledge. If you look at what is proposed, I think it gives us a huge competitive advantage over a relatively short period of time."
But we will not need to wait until 2001 for action. On Monday BT - its hand forced both by the imminent arrival of serious competition and by surging demand for high bandwidth fuelled by Britain's internet boom - announced a multi-million pound order for high bandwidth equipment to upgrade 400 exchanges serving 6m households.
That equipment should be in place by April next year, and BT has already signed up two companies - Video Networks and VirginNet - to supply video on demand and internet access at high speeds over the new technology, called ADSL (see panel on facing page). Subscribers will be able to access a library of 1,000 films from £1.99 a title, downloading them through the phone line to watch on their TV. Live entertainment has been scheduled - but not until 2001, when a ban on BT broadcasting is lifted.
BT has refused to comment on the broadband issue beyond its official response to the Oftel proposals. This said it would co-operate with Oftel and the industry, and "press on with its bold plans for rolling out the new technology". But a former BT executive says that the company has had to rapidly change its plans in the face of a sudden increase in demand.
John Harper, former managing director of BT's inland division, says: "It's common knowledge in the industry that BT has suddenly accelerated its thinking on ADSL. "There were reports around two months ago that BT's chief executive, Sir Peter Bonfield, chided his senior directors for not following their hunches on fast moving technologies. My interpretation is that was probably Bonfield waking up to what was happening, and telling his people to get on with it."
Harper says the Oftel report, and the change that will bring about, is "an extremely good thing. It's long overdue, and I think David Edmonds, the new regulator, is extremely imaginative." But he adds that squabbles between BT and its rivals, who will be expecting access to BT's local loop for the first time, are inevitable.
"It's absolutely predictable that there will be years of argument over how BT wants to charge competitors for the use of its plant. I would have gone the whole hog and given the responsibility of running the whole network to a separate company." That's a view shared by the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications, a pressure group fighting for flat-rate charging for phone calls. "We're very happy - Oftel have done a reasonably good job," says spokesman Erol Ziya.
"But we are worried that there are all sorts of opportunities for BT to obstruct and delay things while they have control of the exchange equipment themselves." While BT and its rivals fight over their telephone lines, cable companies will hope to steal a march by rolling out their own new broadband services, some of which will be available later this year. They will hope to gain an early lead in the home multimedia race, even though their cables serve only around 50% of UK homes, and 16% actually use their existing services - compared with 85% using
BT's lines. Peter Hall, who is leading cable operator Telewest's digital rollout, says that cable companies have been testing the next-generation of their services for years, waiting for the right time to launch them for real. That time is approaching fast, he admits, although he has a cautious approach when suggesting what the public wants.
"We'll be launching digital TV services in the fourth quarter of this year, and we expect a fairly rapid roll-out across all the Telewest regions," he says. "We've got a very broad bandwidth available to us - 60 channels, each capable of carrying 34Mbits of activity, and we can carry them down to quite a small group of homes.
"But people are fairly conservative in general - it has taken them a long time to take to multi-channel TV, and we're not going to see an interactive revolution in the next year or two. What people will want are things like video on demand, with true video cassette performance without the trip to the video store, and those kind of services will become very broadly used. And I think there will be much broader use of email through the TV and into the home.
"We will be able to deliver interactive services, although we're going to be cautious how we do that. Rather than simply give people the broadest access to the internet, which quite frankly is becoming a little unmanageable at the moment, we're going to try and give people selective navigation through a 'walled garden', which is the only natural way to do it through the TV."
So confident is Hall that Telewest's plans - and cable in general - will be a success, that he thinks the other technologies will be relegated to niche applications. He cites the range of applications which will become available - from streaming video through online gaming, to home control - and says: "If you're really looking at how the home will connect with the rest of the world, then cable becomes the natural winner.
"We don't have to wait for tomorrow's technology solution, and the infrastructure is already built. We don't have to launch satellites, or build transmitters, or anything like that." His final comment refers to the final form of broadband on the horizon - more distant than the others - which will eschew wires altogether, and bring you multimedia through the air.
Hughes Network Systems has already developed a satellite-based internet access system, where web pages and files requested by users via an ordinary modem dial-up con nection are bounced off a satellite to their own receiver. The company's chief scientist, Arthur Christian, says the new broadband buzz-word for them is MWS - Multimedia Wireless Systems, since the decision by European regulators to open up a wide amount of radio spectrum for the system. Users will be able to send and receive data over the airwaves, thanks to a small aerial mounted on their wall or roof. And it should be fast, he says.
"From the sort of technology we're looking at, it will be comparable with the sort of bandwidth that cable data modems will be offering. "I expect that we will see systems with 40 megabits of capacity going out in a radio cell, shared between the different users in the cell, as happens with cable modems. "Once the spectrum allocation issues are resolved, wireless will become a much hotter topic than it is now; I'd very much advise an attitude of watch this space - this is going to be the hot one in a year or two."
