NHS workers deserve our applause – but so does the telecoms industry

Next time there is a highly deserved round of public applause for NHS workers, do add one additional clap for the tele-communications industry for — so far — keeping the show on the road. High-speed broadband, for those lucky enough to have it, has made self-isolation more tolerable, and may have significantly reduced the impact of the disease in Britain.

I say this because, for several weeks before it became mandatory to stay indoors, a large number of people did so voluntarily. That includes me. Ever since my grandfather contracted jaundice and so avoided landing at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli, there has been a proud family tradition of calling in sick at the first sign of a sniffle.

And here, just outside the M25, I was not alone in self-isolating early. From the half-empty station carparks, it was clear people were avoiding London when they could. (Did this help? We’ll know in a few years. But many of the Home Counties have infection rates which seem oddly low compared with the capital.) The reason people could avoid this journey is down to two fairly recent developments. Decent broadband upload speeds and video–conferencing software that doesn’t stink.

To give you some idea of the astronomical expansion of the world’s data transmission capacity, what better than a story from astronomy? In the mid-1990s my brother, an astrophysicist, was involved in a project where a telescope near Canberra in Australia would send star-survey data overnight by internet to Lawrence Livermore in California. A night’s data might amount to six gigabytes or so — about the same as watching two films in high definition on Netflix. Soon after the project began, they received a nervous call. Their project, it emerged, accounted for 10 per cent of the internet traffic between Australia and the west coast of the United States.

So when your sulky teenager throttles your home internet connection by downloading a 51GB patch for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on the PS4, they are casually using what used to be a day’s worth of trans-Pacific bandwidth shortly before their birth.