So there’s this river. Big, deep, wide. Cliffs on either side and a tricky path down from them.
Stuff needs to get across it. It really needs a bridge.
But that would involve major engineering on both sides, and the discussions and standard-setting on that bogged down many years ago.
So we have the ferry.
It’s a good ferry. It’s not particularly big. Without the advertising campaigns perhaps many would not even know it exists. But it does its job. Ploughing over the river, back and forth, many times a day.
A lot’s been said about the ferry. Because it’s the only way across the river, there’s a tendency to talk it up. The local mayors are the worst. “Our ferry can carry anything, almost instantly,” they say. “The only limit is our imagination.”
Because, you see, they’ve come to believe that the ferry is a bridge.
And now there are these enormous pieces of pipeline, 100ft in diameter, that have to get across the river. They’ve been piled up on one of the cliffs for over five years now. “Our ferry can do it”, cry the mayors – “…if only the crew were a bit more willing.”
The Ferry Captain (who has been awarded all sorts of honours over the years, including a fancy hat that used to say “Ferry Captain”, but which at one awards dinner was changed – with a marker pen – to read “Bridge Captain” in drunken scrawl) does what she can to run the ferry safely.
But she shivers when she looks up at the giant concrete circles, and the comparative fragility of her boat bobbing below on the strong currents. “One day,” she says, “– one day soon, we’ll be strong enough to load that up,” pale as she says it.
The show must go on. And everyone, even the mayors, knows in their hearts that those pipelines are going nowhere. That it’s only a rather small ferry, on awfully rough water.
And it’s a lot more convenient to keep pretending it’s a bridge.
just about sums up the state of broadband in the UK. the poor old victorian phone network is the ferry, bravely delivering more traffic than it was ever designed for, and the pipes are all the dark fibre, not lit. They are empty cold pipes, because anyone who lights them is taxed by our narrowminded government. They are empty because the ISPs can’t afford to use them, and BT wont deploy them because they can get revenue from the poor old ferry. Until government do something about these pipes digitalbritain will lag behind the rest of the world who are laying and lighting fibre. Poor old ferry. Poor old UK. Third world comms. And the answer is there looking at them all the time. Fat pipes. But government still pretend copper is broadband. Just like the mayors think the ferry is a bridge.
A modern fable, beautifully told, and sounding sadly very familiar. The folk song “The Water Is Wide” played in my head as I read this.
Paul, they’re building a tunnel under the water, which carries the ferry. Expect to see trains stuck in it a few years from now due to adverse weather conditions.