Connecting Households or People?

The summer has been busy for our Community Connectivity project, which is exploring how access to the Internet can improve people’s health outcomes. One of the things we’re exploring in the project is how to make Internet access free or extremely affordable; as part of that we’re working out how to provide community-owned connectivity. 

There are lots of moving parts to this pilot. While our colleagues are crunching the numbers to  identify neighbourhoods in Southwark and Lambeth that might particularly need affordable connectivity, we’ve been working out how to make it happen.

We recently held a workshop  and invited a few technologists in our network to help work through some of the technical and infrastructural challenges. As well as Tom (co-author of this blog post) and our colleague Anna Hamilos, we were able to spend a couple of hours talking through the challenges with Jonty Wareing, Wesley Goatley, Ed Saperia and Amandeep Singh Kellay from our funders, Impact on Urban Health. A good workshop doesn't just rearrange ideas you already have; it should also be able to confront and challenge the assumptions it's built upon.

As we explored ways to provision community-owned Internet access in a range of different sorts of housing,we confronted an assumption we'd been taken as read: the gap between traditional ideals of "broadband infrastructure" and Internet access in 2023.

The term "broadband" feels dated: its popular usage emerged to distinguish faster fixed-line Internet-connections from slower connections via dial-up modems. A broadband connection was noticeably faster, and always on - it could easily be shared within a property. The home Internet went from being on one computer, in one room, to being easily shared - via emerging ubiquitous wireless networking standards, and a broadband router - to any device in a house.

But now the Internet is everywhere. Mobile Internet has gone from being an expensive add-on to a phone contract, to the primary form of Internet access for huge numbers of users.

At the workshop, a striking challenge to our initial assumptions emerged:

Given how much people use their phones to get online now, one workshop attendee asked if we should be looking at making that easier – does everyone need broadband at home, or should we be looking at something that travels? Do we want to connect the household, or the person? 

After all, domestic and mobile Internet connections are billed very differently. On a domestic connection, you primarily pay for speed of access. The connection is always on, and somewhat unmetered - there are usage caps, but they are often very high. But you need to pay more for a faster connection. The social tariffs available to the poorest users [see our previous post] are often the slowest available connections.

But: they still connect to the Internet, even if it's slow.

By contrast, on a mobile connection, you pay for quantity of data. Your connection always connects as quickly as possible, based on signal strength, but you are limited in how much you can consume. And that means you can run out of Internet. 

The cheapest tariffs have the smallest amount of data available to them. Some networks zero-rate particular connections - for instance, networks like Voxi provide free access to particular social media and messenger applications. But if you're out of data, you either need to buy more, or wait for your billing month to end.

This has a big impact on some people's lives: for instance, we know shift workers can have a problem booking shifts at work if they don't have any data left.

This challenge led to a thoughtful counter: if we focus on non-domestic connections, are we still focusing on a solution for a specific community?

We think the answer is yes. Where people access the Internet doesn't affect the fact that the communities we are looking to work with are significantly digitally deprived - that deprivation is not related to where they are accessing the Internet. And there are communal aspects to how Internet access can be enabled: how it is rolled out, how community peers can support one another, how technical tasks for people with English as a second (or third, or fourth) language can be streamlined. After all, there is all manner of support to be done beyond simply giving access - making meaningful use of that access is also important.

Towards the end of the workshop, Rachel reminded us of the fact that many of our perspectives around connectivity are inevitably shaped by our own usage. The participants in this workshop all had not only fast domestic connections, but our own personal computers - sometimes supplied by employers - and we all worked from home from time to time. That might be typical for us, but there are people for whom it's entirely unrepresentative.

And this misrepresentation extends to policy. Policy often focuses on 'broadband' as a synonym for 'high-speed Internet', when for many people, that may not be an appropriate or feasible delivery method. Policy also often assumes that installation of infrastructure is the end-goal - once the Internet is there, people will be able to use it for "productivity" or "growth" (much of the 'broadband in the regions' dialogue in the 2000s was inevitably focused around economic growth). 

Real life, of course, is different to policymaking, and people’s circumstances are often very different and more complex than the scenarios that drive policies and big business models. The Minimum Digital Living Standard is going some way to busting the myths about what is needed to fully engage in digital society, and it’s also important to remember that not everyone has the luxury of a safe and stable place to live. 

The infrastructure that this project is exploring is access and availability to the network - not necessarily cables in the ground. By confronting that idea, we began to expose many useful threads to tug on in future research, and also the assumptions and defaults that exist in the layers that sit beneath and shape our infrastructure - policy and law.