From Infinity, to beyond…

Screenshot 2020-01-31 at 16.11.51

So, exactly ten years ago, BT launched their new “Infinity” service, some of us wondered what they could possibly call a subsequent upgraded service and no-one (well hardly anyone!) quoted the well-known line from Toy Story etc. etc.

Well now we know. Beyond Infinity lies vapourware*, or Halo as we now discover this is called.

It was inevitable that BT would seek to combine its cellular and landline activities ever since it acquired EE back in 2015. Almost five years later and this is it. Once again, the UK’s telecomms giant proves it has the imagination and resources to push the technological envelope and offers us a fantastic new nothing.

TheStickler is currently writing this blog in a remote, rural village in France. Connectivity is via a 4G router, and the upload and download speeds comfortably exceed anything he can obtain even via fibre (to the cabinet, i.e. “Infinity” style products) in the UK. Installation (last year) was a breeze, set up was virtually automatic, and the pricing is less than that charged in the UK for a markedly inferior service.

Halo promises to give us the best of landline and mobile in one convenient “no limits” package. I suppose if you own a ton of copper phone lines and have spent the last 10yrs in indolent inertia failing to roll out a decent fibre infrastructure even to the built-up areas let alone the country as a whole, then clinging on to the belief that wires are best might be understandable.

So who are the muppets allowing BT to get away with this? OFCOM are toothless and seemingly unable to encourage anyone to challenge this turgid technical torpor. Government commissions a review here and a report there, but nothing changes. Britain’s decline into third world internet status continues.

But then as recently as last October, in a move that could actually make a difference, the government announced that the main mobile operators have signed up to mast sharing in rural areas. Suddenly the prospect of some decent mobile phone coverage right across the land has taken a step forwards. But where’s the joined-up thinking? Everything else seems to be focussed on wires, not wireless. But if this network of collaborative masts is implemented properly, and, perhaps more to the point, breaks the monopoly of OpenReach (a BT business) then things might start to change for the better.

Meanwhile, as nothing actually new except some clever marketing (aka BT Halo) is splashed up on billboards across the land there’s finally been a decision re the UK 5G roll out. No surprises here: Huawei are in the game! Because there’s no practicable alternative**. It was a non-decision. Portrayed as whether Huawei should be involved at all, when the real point is it’s Huawei or no way. Why is it that we have no real competitor to Huawei?

Is an alleged national security risk really an issue? It’s the internet people, and anyone with a packet sniffer and a GCSE in Hacking can listen and capture whatever they like. (Unless it’s encoded and or tunnelled etc. and then they might need a decent A level pass instead). Put a micro processor and some comms inside a device and it becomes open to attack. Not just by the Chinese. By anyone. So if all our fridges stop working in the future because some cryogenic cyber clown has remotely switched off the lot then we will reap what we are now sowing. Feature creep – the process by which arguably unnecessary functionality is added to a device to try and make it outstrip the competition – now means consumers are becoming able to access every household device, and more, from anywhere. Which means Harry Hacker can too, and not just the progeny of Sun Tzu.

People still haven’t learned the lessons from the Millennium bug. Yes, that one that got less people than SARS and Corona. Still, BT could have done worse. Thank god they chose “Halo” and not “Corona” for their new vacuous vapourware. That could have been an expensive rebranding exercise.

Will someone in the UK please start up a wireless internet service (and with WiFi calling / Voice over Internet Protocol telephony it will handle phone calls as well as data). It could even use existing 4G for now as the French have ably demonstrated. The 2019 Labour manifesto had this idea of a one nation internet service that removed the green box lottery and BT’s stranglehold on the competition. Then, at long last, BT would either have to raise their game and come up with something useful or go bust. Win win I’d say… BT is historically a telephone company that’s had to try and evolve into a tech business. It’s surely not that surprising that it’s made a complete hash of it.

And finally, proponents of HS2 argue that giving the North faster access to London and Heathrow’s international hub is so critical, but when did they last use video-conferencing? Ah, yes – much of the internet “up north” is generally so crap that’s not really a serious option.

Was there a plea for some joined-up thinking earlier in this post? The best way to cut out fuel costs of any sort is to reduce travelling. But for those European journeys that are really necessary, mainland Europe (and in particular the French again) have been well ahead of the game for decades now with an environmentally more acceptable, and much more efficient, high speed rail network. Paris to the south of France in 3hrs. City to city, not airport to airport with all that faffing around waiting and getting/to from the flights. Yet the UK is seemingly all set to build a third runway at Heathrow (which isn’t even on the HS2 route)? If and when Crossrail finally starts up things should improve, but Euston (the HS2 London terminus) isn’t on it. And neither is London St Pancras International. Brilliant!!!

A really progressive and enlightened government could (amongst many other things):

Scrap the third runway at Heathrow (or anywhere else),
Build HS2 – all of it. And faster than the present proposals if humanly possible. And Northern Powerhouse Rail, or whatever the Liverpool to Hull revamp is called this week.
Invite Ericsson and Nokia to build our 5G network using collaborative masts throughout the country, not just in the sticks. (Compensate Vodafone and EE if necessary, it’s peanuts in the overall scheme of things).
Politely inform the USA that our new trade deal will reflect the above.
Add the missing link – so that high speed trains can run non-stop from the north of England to mainland Europe. It seems a (freight) route from Primrose Hill to Camden Gardens might be already there? Can this also directly interchange with the Crossrail network. Farringdon anyone?
Put some real effort (and not just a sound bite or two) into developing a UK 5G solution (and 6G -TheStickler hesitates to say “and beyond”!!!), which, crucially, is not actually manufactured in China (which is in fact the case not only for Huawei, but for both Nokia and Ericsson too). And let’s build our own UK silicon valley somewhere up north – newly connected by all of the above…

*hardware: the chips and their printed circuit boards etc. software: the code that makes it all do something. vapourware: the BS that describes the claims for what it will do 😉

**Yes, Ericsson and Nokia both have 5G radio hardware but adopting either means sacrificing every Huawei 4G mast (and theStickler believes that’s most of them) and replacing it with the competitor’s technology whereas Huawei can simply upgrade their own kit from 4G to 5G, in place. Someone should have seen this coming when 4G was rolled out. Now it’s a little late. Vodafone, for example, stated it would cost “millions” to replace Huawei 4G with a competitor 5G solution.

References:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply