The universal lack of bandwidth in the local loop was a hidden and critical component in the dotcom bust and a key factor in the demise of internet services. The business-to-business (B2B) sector enjoys high-speed networking over corporate LANs (local area networks), and it has expanded world trade while simultaneously realising vast operational savings. The business-to-consumer (B2C) sector has, however, realised an insignificant fraction of its potential.

The main reason for sluggish B2C growth is the lack of bandwidth, or speed, which is available to the public. As a result, a new consumer-to-consumer, or peer-to-peer, sector has been born out of frustration, and it is now the most vibrant in terms of growth. Here bandwidth is wide and free, and fuelling a huge semi-legal economy. In less than a year, this sector has made the controversial music-sharing website Napster look like a kindergarten experiment, and it is now well beyond taxation and control.

So when will we get bandwidth in the home? Will digital subscriber line (DSL) technologies save the day? I think not. This last gasp of the copper network will merely provide a "Band-Aid" solution that already looks sick before it is deployed. Far too little, far too late is the cry. What use 256kbit, or even 2Mbit/s, over two kilometres? This might have been an interesting prospect a decade ago, but even then fibre in the local loop had far more to offer, and the gap between PC memory, clock rate, processing speed, applications and file size has widened 1,000-fold in the same time span. Copper is a more or less static technology that has seen little fundamental progress or change over the last 50 years. In contrast, computers, optical fibre and data networks see performance doubling year-on-year.

What is to be done? The good news is that much of the local loop cabling is installed in buried ducts that obviate the need for huge amounts of civil engineering, better known as digging up the road. Replacing the old copper cables with optical fibre is a straightforward proposition that first became economically viable in 1986 when the network companies could not see the need for wide-band connections. Today, we no longer have a choice. In the same way that economies are crippled by a lack of adequate road and rail transport, future economies will be even more damaged by a lack of bandwidth.

What about satellites? Well, geo-stationary, and more recently low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, have always made an insignificant bandwidth contribution, and they will always be more expensive than fibre. Their only real attributes are rapid deployment in difficult terrains and mass coverage for broadcast. On the other hand, radio and free-space line-of-sight optical links in the local loop could certainly be early winners, and could deliver serious bandwidths over 10Mbit/s.

The most pressing problem is the lack of business models that make economic sense. This fundamental problem crippled the LEO networks, ravaged the dotcoms, took out WAP (wireless application protocol) services, and is currently crippling 3G (third generation) network deployments. It might be that we have to look at the future of local networks in a new way.

To kit out with fibre every home office, school, hospital and company in the UK, for example, would only require an estimated £15 billion. This is only a fraction of the monies wasted on 3G mobile licences and the old copper technologies installed by the telephone and cable companies over the past decade. It seems to me that this is too important to leave to chance; it needs to be a national consideration, and it needs a national determination to avoid a third world outcome.