|
1. Introduction
This report looks at how the UK market for the provision of access and connectivity to the internet has evolved to consist of a significant number of companies offering a large number of diverse and sophisticated services. It is intended to be read by those who are investigating the area of internet service provision and aims to provide some background and a high level view of the challenges and opportunities the industry faces. Quocirca would like to thank all the participants for their time to take part in the briefings and interviews from which the data for this research was derived. Without their participation such reports would not be possible.
2. Connection to the internet
The collection of networks that makes up the internet has grown out of all proportion from what started out as a way to connect military research computers, known as the Arpanet. Initially, extension was through organic growth of a network, swiftly followed by like-minded (or at least the use of like protocols) networks peering with each other. When the internet started to break out of its academic and government research roots, obtaining a connection was a somewhat haphazard affair. From the early batch-driven parcels of messages and files copied from one machine to another at a network edge via the UNIX to UNIX Copy Program (UUCP) and dialling in to a specific host via a terminal interaction program (tip), connection has become virtualised and transparent.
Selling connection as a service evolved in the UK from a handful of access providers—such as Demon, Pipex, Eunet, CIX and CompuServe—in the early 1990s, many of which had highly proprietary connection means, into an industry of regional and national internet service providers. As the industry has grown, the offer of the service provider has evolved. At one time, a sufficiently large bank of modems, email address and file transfer site sufficed, then regional low cost points of presence, web site development, hosting, security and protection all emerged as potential value add.
Some tried to become initially the sole, or later the primary, destination for those they connected, by offering content as a „walled garden‟. However as the network grew, the opportunity to provide content exploded and the closed environments ultimately failed or opened up to be, at best, jumping off points into a larger sea of information.
As the internet has moved from connection-oriented dial up to an always on broadband service, and underlying network services have increasingly become commodities, the role of the internet service provider has moved further from simple access into applications and services.
3. Service provision
From the outset, applications and services have been delivered across this open network. Email, information access and presentation through web pages and wikis, as well as search services like Google, may be thought of as a recent phenomena, yet the early internet had these functions, albeit a little more basic in implementation. These included Wide Area Information Search/Storage (WAIS), searching with gopher and veronica (very easy rodent-oriented net-wide index to computer archives—a graphical interface to gopher indicating a certain type of humour has also long inhabited those involved with the internet) as well as shared bulletin boards where initial ideas were built upon and corrected by like-minded people.
Rich media & bandwidth hungry
The availability of bandwidth and ubiquity of connection now permits far more interesting, interactive and rich media applications where those using the internet can communicate in ways combining data with digital telephony, and download and share both high fidelity music and broadcast quality video. However, in the mix of usage, even those consumers of rich media will sometimes only exchange simpler messages where delay is not an issue; will access written and graphical information with little interaction; or will interact with others in ways that do not consume large amounts of network resources, but do depend on imperceptible time lag. No longer does the term „surfing‟ seem adequate for the range of activities that users are engaged in over the internet; some involve the heavy „lifting‟ or downloading of large amounts of data over a period of time. Others, like video conferencing, require the maximum performance in terms of capacity and interactivity—flying over the network, rather than the ground—and some, like interactive gaming or even voice telephony, need to be as dependable as driving (Figure 1).
|
