Rurtel

~ the obituary ~

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland are among the emptiest inhabited places in Europe. People live hours apart on single-track roads, ferries decide what is possible in winter, and any organization working across the region spends most of its budget moving bodies around. In 1986 a research charity called the Arkleton Trust decided to test whether a modem could take that cost out.

Rurtel was the result. It ran CoSy, the conferencing software written by John Black's team at the University of Guelph, on a server sitting at Nethy Bridge, and it opened with eight simultaneous lines available twenty-four hours a day. Members dialed in over ordinary telephone lines from ordinary computers. What they got was electronic mail, threaded conferences and file transfer, in 1986, in Strathspey.

The three-year pilot set a target of sixty users. By 1989 roughly a hundred and fifty individuals and organizations were on it, spread across fourteen countries, because a system built to hold together a Scottish region turned out to hold together a European research program just as well. Dr John Bryden, who ran the Trust's research program, coordinated a twelve-nation study of rural change in Europe from a converted barn on his farm.

~ the case file ~

~ the pilot ~

The early users were not hobbyists. The Association of Community Enterprises in the Highlands and Islands issued Amstrad laptops to field staff so that people working out of village halls could file into the same system as the office. Voluntary bodies and education organizations came next, all of them chosen because distance was actively costing them something. Torch Computers supplied hardware, British Telecom supplied lines, and the Highlands and Islands Development Board supplied the reason it existed.

The pilot ended in 1989 and was evaluated by the Department of Rural Extension Studies rather than by a marketing team, which is why there are usable numbers about it at all. Nobody was trying to prove Rurtel was popular. They were trying to work out whether a rural economy behaves differently when the people in it can reach each other for the price of a local call.

~ the point of it ~

This is where I have to be honest about distance, and it is not the usual kind. Turkey has its own version of the Highlands problem, whole provinces where getting anything done means a long drive, and it never got a Rurtel. There was no charity here running a conferencing system out of a village so that rural organizations could stop traveling. What arrived instead, much later, was commercial internet access sold city first, priced for cities, with the countryside connected last because that was the order the market produced.

The difference is who the network was for. Rurtel was built to let people stay where they were. Almost every network I have used since was built to let people reach a market, and those two goals produce different products even when the wire is identical.

~ the long tail ~

Rurtel worked well enough that the argument moved up a level. The results fed into the Highlands and Islands Initiative, a telecommunications upgrade worth 16.2 million pounds, completed in 1992, which gave the region the first regional ISDN network in rural Europe. A dial-up service running on eight lines in a Scottish village produced the evidence that got a whole region rewired.

In 1990 responsibility passed to the Network Services Agency, a company set up by the Development Board with British Telecom, and Bryden's own account has BT taking it over outright in 1993. It carried teleworking and distance learning through the mid-nineties and was wound up in 1997. Killed by its own case, in the end, since once the region had ISDN and the web had arrived there was no reason to dial a conferencing server in Strathspey to talk to somebody in Orkney.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »