Hi

I write a regular column for a UK monthly - "New Economy" (www.e-
neweconomy.com).

The following draft is set for the October edition. It might be
relevant to the workshop.

Chris Cook



The Broadcast Web

While it is generally accepted that the Holy Grail in internet terms
is the provision of Broadband access the available technology appears
to be limited in its ability to deliver.

ADSL provision through copper telephone wires doesn't work more than
3km from an Exchange: cable is fine for major population centres, but
the sheer cost of the infrastructure is bound to limit take-up of the
service.

As for mobiles; the outcome of the vast enabling infrastructure
spending on spectrum and technology has effectively been a windfall
tax on those Banks who have funded it. And why do you need broadband
on a mobile anyway?

The eventual solution, however, as is often the case, may be staring
us in the face: the Broadcast Web.

Broadcast data, whether broadcast terrestrially or via satellite, is
transmitted at a rate in excess of 2 Megabytes per second (ie some 40
times the capacity of an ordinary modem). And an infinite number of
individuals can receive it, whereas even the most powerful network
rapidly clogs up when a multiple of users use bandwidth-hungry
applications at the same time.

A classic recent example was the collapse of a major French Bank's
network when their traders logged on en masse to the "Big Brother"
website to view a particularly risqué segment.

Any regular user of the Internet will have observed the massive
asymmetry in the flow of data. A few bytes travel out to find the
websites we wish to view, and we then laboriously download the
website frame by frame and access the data we require within it. And
how many of us have cursed the flashy graphics and animations which
slow the process to a crawl?

Let us therefore do something radical: turbocharge Teletext.

Even the most technologically challenged of us has come to terms with
Teletext during its 25 year history. The transmission of Teletext
pages is accomplished through use of those 30 out of 625 "scan lines"
on a TV screen which cannot be used because time must be allowed for
the TV scanning beam to return to the top of the screen once it has
reached the bottom.

A few users have also used the "Viewdata" system, originally
developed by the Post Office in the days when they ran telephony as
well, of accessing public information via standard telephone lines,
and displaying it on the TV screen.

If digital TV broadcast instead of a TV channel the data encapsulated
in a website the effect would be a stupendous increase in data
dissemination. But what would be required at the receiving end?
Here, the requirement is for a "Web Browser in a Box".

Recent developments in the humble "Set Top Box" or "STB" are
relevant. Enfocast (www.enfocast.com) has developed a router –
effectively a corporate STB – which allows data to be received via
satellite and "multicast" throughout corporate networks – permitting
TV "Direct to the Desktop".

Nokia are building an STB which will effectively provide a Home Media
Gateway to an internal home network of digital TV's; PC's and other
devices. Pace Technologies are also active in the retail field with
their own variant STB.

The "BrowserBox" STB would incorporate:
· an Internet Browser programme NOT bundled to a proprietary PC
operating system, but rather a stripped down Linux-based OS (as with
the Nokia STB);
· reasonable graphics capability and processing power;
· adequate data storeage on a suitable medium.

The current Teletext conventions could then effectively be adopted so
that the channels and categories so familiar to millions of UK users
were retained.

The outcome would be that the former "ViewData" becomes an
Internet "BackChannel". And Teletext becomes the "Broadcast Web"
where rather than scroll though a few TeleText pages we actually
download Websites, frames and all.

We could watch TV on half the screen and access the Web at half the
speed – the permutations and combinations are endless: major websites
and TV channels converge.

There could be some interesting outcomes: for instance it is perhaps
appropriate that the former BBC chairman now chairs BT – since such
technology, if made available to every BBC licence holder and
telephone user would effectively mean that the two companies could
converge into a utility UK Channel Service Provider.

Furthermore the US Courts have found that Microsoft have a monopoly
in PC operating systems and one eminent commentator – Dave Winer -
has proposed that Microsoft should be obliged to unbundle its
dominant Internet Explorer Browser into a separate "BrowserCo".

"BrowserBoxes" from competing manufacturers would then be connected
within Home Networks to competing applications rather than to
whatever Microsoft saw fit to bundle with the PC operating system.

Bring on the Broadcast Web.