Yet another post where I talk into AI and then just publish.
Today, I was on a panel at Connected Britain. I did Connected North a few months ago, and I did last year’s Connected Britain, all on the theme of transport.
Now, clearly, there are lots of problems with transport, and there are lots of problems with connectivity. Connectivity reaches far wider and has a bigger effect than transport. But what’s interesting is that almost every time I’ve been to this conference, I always get asked about the state of WiFi on trains, and it seems to be a really, really big issue amongst the industry who set up the telecoms networks, which is what this conference is about.
Now, if it’s such a big issue to them, why aren’t the companies they’re working for working to fix it? Why are they waiting for something, some business case, some use case, some driver, to make them fix this? If you think there should be more and better connectivity on trains, you need to make a better, more comprehensive mobile network.
I’ll give you an example. I live right on the south-western edge of the Greater London urban area. I commute into London Waterloo, and for most of the journey, I cannot get a reliable, stable WiFi connection because the trains cannot get clear phone signals. A lot of the train tracks are built into cuttings through the ground, and the masts are not nearby, they are at the top of the hills, at the top of the embankments, and they are serving the houses and buildings around them. The trains themselves are underneath, in the shadow of these mobile towers.
I know things are improving, but I do wonder sometimes why the companies that are responsible for this infrastructure have workers and colleagues and employees who turn up at major conferences and complain about not being able to get signals on trains, when it’s their network that’s the issue.
This is a common thing. I think we like to blame trains, and we like to blame unions, and we like to blame the NHS, but actually, the economy is made up of all these other bodies that are supposed to be supplying infrastructure.
Another example: today I saw presentations that talked about 6G. Now, I don’t know about you, but I cannot even get a reliable 4G signal, and yet we are told 6G will solve the problems. But none of these companies will work to roll out cells where they’re hardly used, so there will always remain gaps, areas that remain oversubscribed and therefore suffering from huge contention.
I don’t know if, deep down, these companies think the government should pay for this. Maybe they’re right, maybe the government should pay for it. If you think about roads, the current road network started to grow in the early twentieth century, so just over a hundred years ago. We had roads before that, but the boom time came once people started buying cars.
There never seems to have been any question about the amount of money poured into roads. The biggest objections you get to roads are planning objections from residents when they’re ploughing a bypass through. But there never seems to be a question of funding for roads. Britain built thousands of miles of motorways but couldn’t build HS2, they let it become too expensive, one train line. Yet, even out by me, they’re building roads,they’re still building little roads, big roads, medium roads. There’s never a question that roads get the money, and you have to ask why that is.
I think it comes down to politics and philosophy. In a capitalist, so-called free-market system, the notion that roads give us is the notion of freedom. Much as I hate the woman for lots of reasons, Margaret Thatcher talked about roads giving people personal freedom. Roads allow you to get in a car where you live and go exactly where you want, at the time you want, when you want, how you want. Of course, this doesn’t address the traffic jams, the queuing, the overcrowding, and so on, but the notion of personal freedom is embodied in roads.
If you think about trains, they’re the opposite of that, they’re centrally controlled, fixed systems. This, in a sense politically, is part of the Thatcherite reaction to socialism, because a train system can be viewed as being socialist because it is centrally controlled, top-down managed, and you cannot open it up to be as free as the road system.
Also, trains carry far fewer people than roads, so you’ve got to say, well, what’s the value for money? Well, there are lots of arguments, none of which I want to go into particularly, because the point I’m making here is that there are a number of philosophical things at play, and one is personal freedom versus perceived top-down socialistic control.
I have to say, the more you think about it, the more you think: why have things got to be so polarised? If you can invest in roads, why not invest in another form of transport that can get you over vast distances far more quickly and easily, and carry a thousand people? A train on one of the main lines in the UK can carry a thousand people for each journey, and if you’re running one every half hour, you’re carrying literally tens of thousands of people a day—quickly, comfortably, and safely.
It’s not about the old twentieth-century philosophies any more. What we are living in is a world that is increasingly governed by complexity. Everything is increasingly connected, there isn’t a single discrete system left any more. It just doesn’t exist. The world is not left versus right; the world is complexity and emergence.
The reality is, no matter what you talk about, roads and rail, and buses, and cars, they are all connected. Railway stations have car parks. Railway stations have cafés. Railway stations are meeting places. Railway stations are even increasingly social places for people to meet and discuss. If you look at Waterloo, the number of pubs and bars that have opened around Waterloo in recent years since COVID is enormous. These are places where people can meet, because lots of lines of transport converge on them.
I’d wager people would rather get on a train and go and meet somebody somewhere like London Waterloo than drive to Heston Services on the M4 to meet. Service stations are not sociable places, they are literally refreshment stops and shopping centres. But trains have a different function: they bring people together into places that are hard to get to. It’s hard to drive into central London. It’s very hard, and if you encourage cars, it becomes even harder and more congested. Trains are a way to cut through that, and so are buses.
We have to learn that this old, really weird political philosophy of control versus freedom is erroneous. It’s a model from one hundred, one hundred and fifty years ago that somehow staggered on. Everything we have now is connected. There isn’t anything that isn’t connected to something else, and there isn’t anyone that isn’t connected to someone else.
Out of complexity, what complexity mathematics tells us is that there will be emergence, emergence of new things, new behaviours, new needs, new wants. What our governments have to do, and what our telecoms people I met today have to do, is to understand that emergence and dealing with emergence is a completely different beast to just building fixed, limited projects and systems.