#ADSL gratuita: a chi giova?

By ShoppingDONNA · 13 febbraio 2012 ADSL for free. Who benefits from it?
One of the electoral promises that emerge when politicians need to get the "votes of the web". But is it doable in Italy? And if it were, would it truly add any value? For whom?
There's one thing that always makes one like me shiver, one that was born a humanist and wounded up being an informatics guy. Hearing people talk about connectivity without knowing what they're talking about. Politicians do that often, while Italy suffers storically of one of the worst situations in terms of infrastructure and competitivity.
As for the competition front, we must say, things are slowly getting better, at least in perspective: the new FTTCap optic fiber is the product of an agreement between Telecom Italia and Fastweb for sharing tools and investments that might accelerate its realization, and hearing the AD of Telecom Italia Marco Patuano, the model is open to any other operator willing to invest (perhaps locally, where small and medium operators are sttronger and more capillar), creating a situation that is potentially better than the infrastructural monopoly de facto that for many years has costrained the competition field on connectivity in Italy not quite exemplary.
So we have a perspective in which we can sensibly reduce the digital divide, but on a cable base. Because this is where the point is: cable vs. wifi.
Wifi is perceived as something practical, easy to use and with a wider and faster diffusion. When you add the word "free" to "wifi", then the perfect illusions of a world where everybody goes online freely and with no costs to the web, emerge.
But this promise, for whoever takes the responsibility of making it, is an illusion. For merely practical reasons.
First of all let's start by saying the Free Wifi is an added value for a couple of sectors: tourism, certainly, and public services to the citizenship. A free HotSpot, for which the real cost is absorbed by society (so by our taxes, after all) is a tool that can be useful for pure navigation (surfing, email, social network). But the services that are starting to stay online, are much more than that, and they're exactly those that regard productivity that can't live without cable: Voip and Cloud (a term that is way too often used in the wrong way) ahead of all, but also streaming of multimedia content on demand.
Wifi (let it be Wimax or Hyperlan 2) isn't capable of giving acceptable service levels, as for speed on Voip, for example. And if there's one service that for a company (but also for a private citizen) can mean less costs and more indipendence, that's Voip.
But there's another matter, which is safety, along with the level of service.
As an informatic-entrepreneur, I would never accept to make information I work with daily travel on a free ADSL, maybe through a hotspot used by who knows how many and what people. The barriers that I put between me and the risks of the Web, I must be free to manage them on my own, which means I need to be the owner of my peripheral tool and its configuration. So even if I had a cable, free web, no serious company would change it in exchange of its own contracted access. Other than safety, for the level of service, we said: free means that there are also no guarantees of stability or functioning, we all know it, and it's useless to make illusions about it.
In conclusion, it's important that on this aspect we don't feed false promises. Politics must favor and control competition among operators, so that privates and companies can use services at competitive prices, must push to make sure that the technological level of the web is always efficiant and incentivate investments of companies that operate in connectivity supply, but must not go beyond that or promise to statalize the web because, seeing what's on the Internet, produced by parties and movements that are already in elections campaign, the only sensation I get is that high incompetences want to enter a process of which they do not understand anything at all.
Unless, of course, they're not just producing the same impossible promises based on nothing.
Which wouldn't be any news.
Francesco Lanza | @bedrosian