One daily concern for European Windows NT users is the shocking
price we pay for telecoms. Europe has pockets of substantial telecoms
infrastructure, but most countries still have limited competition and high
prices. For example, the two major providers in the UK are British Telecom (BT)
and Mercury, and a gaggle of cable providers in a few areas. On mainland Europe,
the story is not so good. Belgium has areas where only the monopoly telecoms
provider offers service.
For speeds faster than an ordinary analogue phone line, you must hand over
your wallet. For example, I pay BT about $7000 per year for a permanent Internet
connection on an X21 64 kilobits per second (Kbps) line to my Internet Service
Provider (ISP) for standard twisted pair wire.
Europe has an extensive Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN)
infrastructure, especially in Germany, where ISDN is popular. In the UK,
however, you still have to pay a multi-hundred-dollar installation fee and a
quarterly rental that runs to three figures. If you want to use ISDN to connect
to the Internet, very few providers can offer the service, and such a connection
usually requires a high-cost long-distance phone call to make it work.
At least things are changing now. Several cable providers have deals with
ISPs, and if you choose carefully, you can go online at 6:00 pm and be online
all night for no phone-call cost and no per-hour online charges. However, in the
UK, such facilities are available only to the lucky few who live in a major
city.
The Microsoft Network (MSN), of all things, has wrought another major
change: A local call-rate ISDN access facility for the whole UK, so we can surf
the Web at super-modem speeds for the same local-call cost as a modem
connection. Understanding how MSN can provide this service isn't difficult:
Serious ISPs take their incoming telecoms data feeds on fibre optic cable, and
plug them into Ascend Max boxes, which handle modem and ISDN calls with equal
alacrity on any channel. Given the facilities for phone-call redirection at the
telephone company's machine-room sites, setting up local call-rate ISDN for the
whole country is easy. In the UK, several ISPs now offer this service.
Why does this change matter? Well, the size of downloads today makes speed
crucial. Suddenly, floppy discs have become past currency, and large Internet
downloads are the order of the day. CD-ROMs are reserved for final product or
for the monster apps such as Office 97. Point your FTP browser at the excellent
(and mostly unknown) ftp://download.microsoft.com site, and look at the jewels
there. For a zip file to be in the tens of megabytes is not uncommon now, and
Internet Studio comes in at a staggering 52MB.
And if you think we get poor FTP speed performance just because we are on
the wrong side of The Big Pond, let me tell you that I have no problems getting
7Kbps download speed on my 64Kbps line from Microsoft. Contrast that speed to
America Online (AOL), which sinks to a crawl most evenings, or to CompuServe,
which seems to imply that 200 bytes per second is adequate. I used to be
involved with the NT conferences on CompuServe but have abandoned the service
because the Telnet performance is so miserable. Friends such as the inestimable
Bob Chronister tell me that they get excellent performance in the States. A
traceroute from my machine to gateway.compuserve.com shows I get there in fewer
than seven hops with excellent PING performance. But firing up CompuServe's
browser, WinCim3, and making a connection is often fruitless. (Strangely enough,
Microsoft is the company that shows that reliable high-speed Internet
connectivity is entirely feasible--from their monster site in Redmond--if you do
the job right.)
The telecoms environment is improving rapidly in Europe, but we still have
a huge way to go. We still have a lot of room for competition and radical
downward movement in price.
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