Getting blown away in the bandwidth explosion

I'm sitting at my desk at home with the computer of my dreams. It cost a few hundred pounds, and can do anything with sound, video and data I can wish for — if only I can get all that delivered. By early next year, a network gnome will have tweaked whatever it is that needs to be tweaked, my 2Mbps cable net connection will silently swell to 10Mbps, and my LAN will be the size of the planet. I think that will do the trick.

I didn't ask for this extra bandwidth nor will I be paying any more for it: Telewest will have quintupled my speed out of the goodness of its heart. Perhaps the profusion of double-digit broadband competition has helped this generosity: I could switch to more than ten times my original speed for less, but as so often inertia will keep me faithful

This profusion of bandwidth is more than matched elsewhere in Europe. For example, 20Mbps is the norm in France for around €20 a month — and France Telecom is talking about 100Mbps delivered over ordinary copper. An ISP ops guy explained it to me: "There's a glut of bandwidth. Everyone over-invested. So much dark fibre in the ground, and the lit stuff is nowhere near capacity."

File-swappers (you haven't gone away at all, you naughty people) will chortle at the extra pipeage, and the honest purveyors of online experiences can create even more exciting high-calorie content. It's great for media, of course: the Government is already seeing IPTV as the final pep pill necessary to get the nag of analogue switch-off over the line in 2012. Not within range of the transmitter? Never mind, have this set-top box plugged into the phone line — then we can sell off the analogue frequencies to the radio network people who still seem to think bandwidth is scarce and expensive.

The only people not rejoicing will be the Microsofties. It's not that they can't use the bandwidth — those quarter-gigabyte service packs don't distribute themselves, you know — nor that they didn't see it coming. Five years ago, the company invested billions in Telewest and NTL in exchange for a controlling interest in deciding what equipment the cablecos would provide. Remember Microsoft TV?

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the European Commission decided that this was anticompetitive. "Not that we mind the cablecos using MSTV," the Europeans said, "if that's what they want. But you have to give others the chance to bid as well in open competition." Microsoft slunk away from Telewest, selling its $2.6bn investment for $5m — while all this had been going on, the great dot-com bubble had burst and you couldn't give the stuff away. It didn't need the money. It must have been pique.

Microsoft has weathered such bad decisions before. It might have misread the market, the regulatory position and the viability of MSTV, but at least nobody else had taken advantage. Until Google. Showing as much perspicacity as Microsoft has clumsiness, the G has been slurping up that surplus dark fibre like a starving Sicilian at a spaghetti festival. It's not paying dot-com prices, it's not annoying any regulators, it's merely getting itself into the position where it can shift huge amounts of data wherever it likes and however it likes without being beholden to anyone else.

Microsoft's TV strategy relied on total control: the cableco, the set-top box, the data formats, the works. If one bit failed, the lot failed — the downside of control economies throughout the ages. Google may or may not have...

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