Broadband Column

‘I lived without broadband for a week’

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I do everything online. I work, shop and socialise online, I connect to the office PC from home, pay my bills over the internet and even watch TV online.

So how would I cope without my broadband connection for seven days? By Garnet Roach (14/08/09)

‘I was ready to grieve’

I needed to know what I was about to let myself in for so I consulted an expert.

Graham Jones, an internet psychologist, warned me that I would miss my beloved broadband.

“Essentially, the first few days are spent missing the item that's removed - in your case, the internet. You start a process similar to grief, though not as profound,” he said. “You wish you could have your connection back; you want things to be like they were.”

However, he added that I would soon get over the first phase.

“Then the realisation kicks in that you can't get what you want. So you start filling the time with replacement activities,” he said. “For someone without the internet it might be making phone calls, reading books etc. Later, you start to wonder why you were worried about the loss and become grateful for your new found freedom.”

So I was expecting boredom - not being able to catch up on missed episodes of Eastenders, watch videos of juggling cats on YouTube or simply Googling interesting things I came across during the day - but what I wasn’t prepared for was just how inconvenient it would be.

‘I wasted my week queuing’

Not having the internet was frustrating; it also made me late and disorganised.

I pay all my bills online. So this now meant that I would have to phone up my credit card company to pay my bill - which would have been fine if I already had their number. But I didn’t. And I couldn’t go online to look it up. So I rang 118 118, got my credit card company’s number, and ended up being late meeting a friend because I was on hold for so long.

I also missed trains because I was on hold to Transport for London - when I could have checked schedules in seconds online. My weekly travel alerts didn’t arrive, so I didn’t know that the Victoria Line wasn’t running or that there had been a security alert on the Piccadilly Line.

Then there was the amount of time I spent queuing - in the bank; in Sainsbury’s on a Saturday morning for shopping I then had to carry home; at the ticket office to see a show. More than an hour of my week was spent queuing needlessly.

I normally check my balance and transfer funds in seconds using online banking, Sainsbury’s delivers my shopping at a time that’s convenient for me, and I usually buy cinema or theatre tickets online to save time.

‘Painful interruption’

So Graham Jones was right in some ways; I didn’t miss the entertainment aspect of the internet - I watched those DVDs that have been lying around for ages, saw friends more and even wrote a letter. But the interruption to my schedule was painful.

I’m lucky enough to live in London and my fast, reliable broadband connection was back once my week’s experiment was up. But for some people in the UK, trying to do their online banking, shopping or even email services is a daily frustration.

According to the Communications Consumer Panel which champions the consumer with communications regulator Ofcom, 75 per cent of people with the internet at home say they couldn’t live without it - and I’m definitely one of them.

However, more than 4,000 homes are in a “broadband notspot”, connected to a local telephone exchange that doesn’t offer copper wire ADSL broadband at all, while a further three million Brits get less than 2Mb, according to internet research firm SamKnows.

This experiment has given me an insight into what it’s like to be one of these people.

Access to broadband is an issue for society - a reliable internet connection doesn’t just save you money, it also helps you stay connected and is a great social tool, maximising your free time and making life easier - something that everyone should have the choice to use.

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