A while ago, I rambled on about the difference between bits and bytes, and how sometimes an amateur reporter with a passion for a subject will be more reliable than a professional reporter who just needs to get a report written and out of the door.

Well, this BBC story caught my eye and reminded me why I bothered writing that post, as the BBC reports that;

"Homes and businesses in South Yorkshire will receive super-fast broadband as part of a scheme to put the region at the forefront of digital technologies. A 25-megabyte connection will be available from the end of 2009, reaching 1.2m people in Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield."

So what does that mean?

Well, first of all, I've got to presume that by "megabyte", the story means "megabytes per second"- without a unit of time, it's a meaningless number if it's measuring the speed of data. (I'm assuming that it's supposed to be a measurement of speed, given the context— as opposed to, say, available bandwidth or data caps which tend not to get much publicity— despite being a critical limitation. There's no use in having a 50 megabit per second connection if you hit your daily data limit half way through streaming a high-definition episode of Doctor Who. But that's a whole other story…)

If each of those 1.2 million people gets a 25 megabyte connection (assuming that's per second), then that's equivalent of a 210 megabits per second connection for each of them- 4 times faster than the fastest speeds that Virgin Media's highly publicised 50 megabits per second connection that was recently launched on their (very expensive) fibre-optic urban network. Also, 1.2 million people who will receive a 25 megabyte connection is a slightly misleading figure, as they won't each have access to their own connections. With 514,000 households in the area (according to Experian), that would mean each household would therefore have a 490 megabit per second connection— nearly ten times Virgin Media's top speed.

On the other hand, if it's a 25 megabyte connection shared (fairly) between those people, then it means each of those 1.2 million people will get the equivalent to a 0.000175 megabit per second connection- far slower than even the slowest of dial-up connections. Which would hardly be a newsworthy announcement…

And "will receive"— will they? Is someone paying for them to actually receive this service, or is it something that will be available to them, if they choose to take out a subscription to pay for it (and buy a computer to let them use it, and then learn how to use the computer to allow them to make the most of the services that will then be available to them.)

So presumably the actual story is that 514,000 households will be able to receive a 25 megabit per second broadband connection. (Which is considerably different for every actual point of information in that sentence!)

Of course, all this nitpicking over the difference between "Mb", "MB" and "/s" overlooks the bigger and far more important question that the headline raises; how will this "boost the economy"? I'm not sure exactly who will financially benefit from these "next generation" broadband speeds. While it's no doubt great for the users who get to play games, download software and stream video all at once (which isn't just useful for nerds like me who might actually be doing them all at once, but also for households where 3 people might be sharing the same broadband connection.) How and when will the people who are currently without internet access be making the most of a screaming fast broadband connection?

While newspapers are struggling to make money from their online equivalents that their readers are increasingly moving towards, the BBC's (commercial-free) iPlayer and YouTube (not only failing to turn a profit, but also run by a company that is apparently dodging UK taxes) dominating online video, is the bigger story that this is just an illustration that we still haven't yet learnt the lesson that the internet isn't necessarily a machine for magically generating money?