Ukraine v England - The limits of Digital Britain!

The Ukraine v England internet delivered football match did not have the expected volumes, less than 500k viewers to test the national data fabric. It became less a test of a national asset, more a test of our expectations, of hope versus reality. One commentator found the performance pixellated, jittery and buffery, but he failed to make clear whether this was the football or a comment on his connection. It was good to see our 'competitive' market allowed the backup plan to appear so late, broadcasting of recorded highlights on public TV announced after everyone had purchased their subscription. Never the less it makes an interesting study to see how fit the UK internet is for supporting critical events.

As previously predicted the engineers did all they could to make those internet streams work. Many providers suggested you turned off all other applications to help sustain the service. There has no mass out cry (not yet anyway) from users to reclaim their subscriptions. There was generally an expectation of low quality which no doubt reduced demand. There was huge dissatisfaction with not being able to see the game live on TV, with a live TV experience. The UK internet was capable of delivering upto 300k simultanious live video streams of up to 1Mbps and provide a user experience less than that available on TV. Given the video streams were of only up to 1Mbps, then the experience was going to be limited. So what can we conclude?

The one thing everybody knows but wishes to forget, particularly those marketing Broadband and the BBC iPlayer team is that the UK Internet has not been built as a live TV distribution system. Less well known is that there is no plan to make it so.

If you look at the small print long enough, the UK internet pretty much behaved in the manner expected. It is engineered as a best effort data delivery system where the resources are shared and the bandwidth allocations for peak hour usage while hidden, can be estimated at about 30kbps per user.

It was good that nobody suggested this would work on a mobile broadband service, but sad that after £24bn in auction fees our infrastructure cannot even support a best effort attempt. If the money goes to purchasing the right to create scarcity what can we expect?

From a national critical asset perspective the engineers used the available assets to delivering circa 300k video streams, and coped with many that number of other sites broadcasting pirated streams. They appeared ready to go to 1m individual data streams. So we worked within the limits of the system.

Working within the limits of the system did not deliver what customers actually wanted, they wanted a live real time broadcast experience. The Digital Britain report never spelt it out that our current approach on competitive 'affordable' broadband means the delivery of 'live' TV would remain the preserve of digital transmitters on satellites and radio masts. But this is something everybody has now worked out for themselves. Is this ok? And if the UK internet is not engineered for this outcome, what set of outcomes are actually possible?

Word of mouth and everyday experience suggested that the internet based user experience of Ukraine v England would be poor and thus the demand to see the national game on the internet was in reality very low. So Perform, Kentaro (the online rights holders) got away with it and claimed 300k paying customers for a national English game a success. Most beer companies and the governments excise men must be crying in their coffees. Perform, Kentaro are being very responsible in saying this is good for niche sports distribution. But this creates a huge problem. Our connectivity is full of potential but ..just do not push it! It makes a joke of every ISPs claims, the propaganda issued by Ofcom on average speeds, and the governments declarations on Digital Britain.

It does, however demand we go back and define the outcomes we expect from a Universally delivered Broadband service. While it may support live TV streams in a limited way the end to end service as we speak will not be engineered for that purpose. This is not what we want to hear, but it is good to be reminded of it. If the nation needs something different, then we need a plan to make it so. So success or fail? As a way to measure expectations or the lack of, it was a huge success. Expectations are low, it's formal. As a mean of exposing the limits of Digital Britain, then it was also successful. I hope it leads to a call for a fuller definition of the minimum universal broadband service or more specifically the outcomes it is expected to support.