When Apple launched the iMac in Britain, trouble-free access to the internet was the main selling point. Actor Jeff Goldblum promised potential buyers an iMac would get them on-line in three easy steps. "Step one: Plug it in. Step two: Switch it on. Step three: There is no third step," a grinning Goldblum promised. A perfectly fair claim in the US. But British consumers - reliant as we are on a creaking telecoms infrastructure - cannot be so confident of reliable access to the internet.
As more and more people get wired up, they are increasingly finding that maintaining a connection to the internet is much less straightforward than the dotcom ads would suggest. Infoserve, a technical support company set up six months ago, specialising in internet connection problems, has received thousands of calls from customers unable to make or maintain connections.
Derek Oliver, managing director of Infoserve, confirms: "A problem with connectivity is the single largest stumbling block we encounter and it invariably takes the longest to resolve." The rapid proliferation of internet service providers (ISPs) in the past few years has led to big variations in standards of service. In the US, the ISPs tended to be off-shoots of established telecommunications companies with large infrastructures and a wealth of experience.
Here the profit margins are so small for ISPs that they sometimes fail to upgrade their capacity by enough to cope with the volume of subscribers they sign up. New customers may be unable to collect email and surf the web because all the lines to their ISP are engaged, said Oliver. Another problem is BT. American consumers see it as part of their telephone company's basic job to ensure a reliable internet connection.
In Britain, most of us are not only forced to pay the cost of a call (although new "unmetered" net access from the likes of Telewest and BT Internet has begun to reverse this trend), but we are not even guaranteed a connection. Phone BT to complain about an dropped internet call and you are brusquely told an "ordinary" BT line is guaranteed only for voice calls. The only way to guarantee internet access is to sign up for Home Highway, for a £150 connection fee and £30 a quarter thereafter.
The problem is that an internet connection requires more bandwidth than a voice call. In the US, the ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber) system has been widely and cheaply available for years. In Britain, BT has decided to push ISDN (Integrated Services Data Network) instead and this is used by the Home Highway service.
The ADSL system allows for a much higher bandwidth than ISDN and lets you to keep your connection open at all times rather than dialling in every time you want to find a web page.
Yet BT does not plan to make ADSL available to consumers until the summer, at the earliest, and then to only a small section of the population. Emily Green, managing director of Forrester Research, an organisation which specialises in mapping the growth of internet technology, says: "There is no doubt that ADSL is a far superior technology. The only reason BT has been promoting ISDN is that it was seen as the next big thing when it became available about a decade ago. BT invested a lot in ISDN and is now trying to leverage its investment."
No telephone company has been keen to roll out ADSL, but BT has been particularly sluggish because it has faced less competition from cable operators than some of their European counterparts, she says. "There is no doubt that the British consumer has had a worse deal as a result."
The smaller the bandwidth, the more vulnerable an internet connection. David Firman, technical manager at Infoserve, says he had a neighbour who lost touch with the web every time it rained. The noise the rain created on the line was enough to break the connection.
Not only do we lack ADSL or affordable ISDN, but even the inadequate capacity of ordinary lines is sometimes further diminished by BT. In some newer households it has "split" the lines using a Digital to Analogue Conversion System (DACS). This works fine for voice calls, but unsuspecting customers trying to get online are liable to have problems.
Even BT admits that DACS is not ideal for the internet, but refuses to say whether it would replace the line if a customer was having problems. Each case would be looked at "individually", a spokesman says.
The final factor causing increased failed connections is the modem itself. As desktop computers become more popular and cheaper, manufacturers are tempted to cut corners to compete. Modems are more likely to be inaccessible and inferior. But, with the prime minister having staked his reputation on stimulating e-commerce, and thousands of new customers clamouring to get on-line every month, it would be nice to think the technical infrastructure was in place to underpin such a seismic shift in communication and commerce.
It seems it is not.
