WIRED:"That triumph of borrowed cables and small intentions, Demon, the first British dial-up ISP, funded a transatlantic internet link by working out that 1,000 people paying a tenner a month would cover the cost

I WAS WORKING late at the internet service provider Virgin Net (which would later become Britain’s Virgin Media) when a colleague came in, looking a bit sheepish. “Do you know where we could find a long networking cable?” How long, I asked. “About as wide, as, well...” and then he named a major London thoroughfare.

One of the main interlinks between a competing internet service provider and the rest of the British internet was down. Their HQ was on one side of this main road and for various reasons, most of the net was on the other side. Getting permission to run a cable underneath the road would have taken forever, so instead they had just hitched up a point-to-point laser beam and carried their traffic over the heads of Londoners. Unfortunately, the network was now severely degraded, due to London fog.

Back then, most ISPs worked together to keep the internet stable and our engineers and theirs had hit on a solution. They were going to string an ordinary, high-speed networking cable across the road until the fog cleared. No one would notice and the wort that could go wrong would be a few dozen feet of computer cable falling on someone’s head. Now their problem was simpler: who did they know in the UK internet community who had a very, very long computer cable?

I cannot yet work out whether being around in those days, when the internet was first being rolled out, is a disadvantage in understanding the complexities and expenses of telco rollout as they are explained to me now – or a refreshing reality check.

I can’t speak for now, but 10 years ago, much of the net was held together by porridge and string. It caused the telcos to pooh-pooh the idea of running any kind of critical service on this new system. Theirs was a far better managed, smarter network.

The internet engineers proudly took on the mantle of being “the stupid network”, and claimed (rightly as it turned out) that it was one of the net’s advantages. While the traditional phone lines were being slowly rolled out by dinosaurs, the young Turks of the net could just throw a cable out of a window and provide unheard of connectivity to millions.

I’ve been re-reading the San Francisco city’s 2006 draft feasibility study on providing fibre to the home. t I love finding out the details of who owns what under a city’s streets – especially if I stand to benefit from their work.

San Francisco’s bandwidth, compared with most European countries, is laughable, partly because communications provision is split between just two companies: ATT and Comcast. That’s why the city is so curious about providing their own, third competitor.

My interest in this is less about politics and more about the scale of any of these operations. As in so many places, the authorities will take many years to provide high-speed bandwidth and the local telco and cable providers are clearly not interested in major network upgrades. But does rolling out bandwidth to those who need it really require that level of collective action? I keep thinking of that other triumph of borrowed cables and small intentions, Demon Internet, the first British dial-up internet provider, who funded a transatlantic internet link by calculating that 1,000 people paying a tenner a month would cover the costs.

The cost of providing high-speed internet to every home in a city the size of San Francisco – around 800,000, or half of greater Dublin’s size – is over $200 million, the study estimates. But what is the cost of one person or business making a high-speed point-to-point wireless connection to a nearby internet provider, and then sharing it among their neighbourhood? Or tentatively rolling out fibre from a company with a good internet connection, one street at a time?

This was how the early internet spread, and I suspect many people and businesses don’t want cable channels over fibreor local telephony or want to wait 10 years for a city-wide fibre network. They just want an ultra-fast cable on their end, with the other end of the cable plugged into the same rack as their servers. And if stringing that cable over the city meant sharing the costs with their upstream neighbours, or agreeing to connect downstream users and defray costs that way, well, the more the merrier.

At least we won’t have DSL speeds and be a slave to an incumbent phone company’s timetable and monopolistic pricing and terms and conditions.

I don’t even think such a higgledy-piggledy, demand-driven rollout would be doable if I hadn’t seen the internet burst into popular use in just a matter of months in much the same way.

But is the network – and demand – still straightforward enough to allow that kind of chaotic, ground-up planning?

Monopoly phone companies won’t back a piecemeal plan like that for business reasons, cities won’t subsidise it because it’s beneath their scale of operation, is too unegalitarian for taxpayers to fund, and because it undermines their own careful control of the planning of the city.

But even if that is true, should either group’s concern be allowed to stand in the way of the net’s natural, chaotic evolution?