Broadband ate my homework

Broadband internet access at home is often described as crucial for the future of this country's economy.

Part of the reasoning is that widespread take-up of high-speed ADSL and cable modem services will boost teleworking, enabling staff to access corporate resources outside working hours, or to work from home some of the time.

Some studies have suggested that this will keep staff happier and could even make them more productive. However, there is an obstacle, and it concerns quality of service, or rather the lack of it.

A recent report indicates that many users of broadband services are becoming increasingly disillusioned because of viruses and various other online threats. These shouldn't prove too much of an annoyance to anyone with a properly configured system, equipped with antivirus protection and a decent client-side firewall. But what about the network connection itself?

I have been enjoying internet access through a cable modem connection for almost a year now, although I use the word "enjoy" in a somewhat loose sense. During this period, I have had to call out an engineer from the cable operator several times, to fix problems that always turned out to involve the setup or network, and not anything under my control.

On the first occasion, it was discovered that the technician who had installed the equipment had neglected to crimp the connectors onto the co-axial cable ends, leading to an intermittent break in the circuit.

The second time around, problems were blamed on low signal quality because of the length of cabling involved - something that should have been checked by the installer and the previous service engineer, I was told. The cable modem has also had to be replaced.

But above and beyond these difficulties, there seem to be ongoing reliability problems with the service itself. The download speed is often so low that I have almost resorted to digging out my old V.90 dial-up modem on several occasions, and the cable operator's internet gateway is offline more often than the trains under private sector contracts.

All of this can be very disruptive to home working if your job requires internet and email access. Imagine that you have to submit a document to meet a deadline, but your connection just happens to be down that day, or your virtual private network (VPN) link to your office gets dropped just before you have a chance to save a vital file back to the server.

For their part, the operators argue that ADSL and cable modem are consumer products, and that anyone needing a guaranteed level of service had better look elsewhere.

But what else is there? Any alternatives are likely to prove too costly for workers to pay for out of their own pocket. Will employers be willing to subsidise an SDSL or E1 line for their staff so they can work from home if necessary? It seems unlikely.

Unless operators improve the quality of their consumer broadband services, the workers' dream of telecommuting is likely to go the same way as that other well-known IT cliché, the paperless office.