Lockdown diary, day 51

Yet another magnificent day - and I think it getting a little warmer.

Very strong support in Foxhouses Road for the "Clap for carers" at 8pm.  I usually appear at my front door but from the back of the house you can hear people clapping all over Calder Valley and Mirehouse.

Extremely busy at work this week - it's the one aspect of my life which has changed relatively little except that we are if anything working even harder trying to address the issues which COVID-19 has meant for BT's network.

My own family is typical - my wife who woks at West Cumberland Hospital is the one member of the family out of the house. I'm not officially a homeworker but can work at home and am therefore am supposed to. My offspring who are now 18 are both also at home for similar reasons - e.g. college not holding face to face lessons but conducting classes online.

So myself and two other members of the family are at home trying to work or study using an ADSL copper line which was put into the house in the worst possible place about 2002 when very few people imagined that 10 megabytes per second of bandwidth might be anything other than vastly more than a normal household would ever need.

Multiply that by about twenty million households and you have a picture for what is happening to the Openreach network at the moment and why a lot of BT and Openreach people are putting in very long working days.

(The following remark is not meant to be rude to most of the people who post comments on this blog, just to the minority who set out to be rude to me. 

Please don't bother making any "helpful"  suggestions about what telecoms option I might want to consider using. 

Unless you have also worked in the Telecommunications industry for thirty years the probability is quite high that I know more about it than you do and approaches one that the people who have already looked into the options on my behalf know a very great deal more.)

Mind you the one safe bet that you can make about the Telecommunications industry is that even the experts will often underestimate how much demand will keep going up.

I must confess that when a colleague at what was then called BT Internet asked me to have a look at their business plan in the last years of the 20th century, my first reaction was "What on earth do they think any of our residential customers will want all this bandwidth for?"

My second thought was "They must think people will be going in a really big way into the sort of online gaming which includes rendered images, or else they expect people to be streaming films over their phone lines."

At about that time Netflix was a small, new, online DVD rental company. YouTube was not even a gleam in the eyes of Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim.

Yet.

Then I reminded myself that one of my first assignments as a newly appointed analyst in BT had been to read all the estimates published by various supposed experts in the press and various market analysts about how big the infant mobile telephone market was going to be and write a summary of what they had predicted.

I had fished out what I had written five years later to compare it with what actually happened and found that the most optimistic projections had underestimated how fast the UK mobile market would grow by a huge margin. What I remember for certain at this distance in time is that it had grown much faster than anyone thought. Exactly how much faster my memory might be playing tricks with me about, but I think most of them were low by a full order of magnitude (that's statistician's language for a factor of ten.)

So back in the late nineties I squashed the temptation to tell BT Internet they were off their rockers predicting so much demand for bandwidth and instead said something like "You're predicting a lot of demand for bandwidth but considering how fast demand has grown for new services I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong."

Just as well I didn't tell them that because they weren't!

Keep well



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