The power of bandwidth

It was about 10 years ago when the internet was still new and groovy, that I got my first taste of the power of bandwidth.

Having just learned of the miracle of attachments, I’d emailed an entire 64 print-ready PDF paged newspaper to my printers, who were located in another state, 1500 kilometres away. It had been a horror deadline and we’d missed the flight that used to take our CD. In fact, it was after midnight and I thought ‘Why not gun this new IT stuff and see how it performs? What’s the worst that can happen?’

The result; our computer server – running a 56kb modem – totally zoned out. When we came into work – 8 hours after hitting “send” - it was utterly non-responsive. We did the standard “reboot it and it will be fine” manoeuvre – several times – but it remained in a world of its own.
I called out our IT guy and explained what I’d done. He looked at me with the long disdainful blink that only a man in a cardigan who relates to circuitry and microchips can do.

“You tried to send an elephant through a straw,” he explained.

“Oh, okay,” I said. “That was a really bad idea then. You can’t fit an elephant down a straw.”

“Well, you can,” he said. “But you have to cut it up into really tiny pieces first.”

It was an “Aha!” moment.

Any expectation of computer work ended for the day. Our poor old system just needed to chew up the elephant. I sent the journalists out on assignment, the sales team out to see customers.

Without the technology, we went back to basics and worked the relationships face to face.

At 3pm – nearly 15 hours after sending the first files – our printers phoned. The pages had turned up and they had stuff to work with. The elephant had come out the other end.

Two hours later, they phoned again. The CD we had sent on the plane the following morning had also showed up. The same information, sent by a traditional method, arrived safely, but more slowly. But they’d moved on and did not need it.

As a newspaper, we never looked back. From that day on we sent the files via email – albeit in smaller bites – and gave the computer time to digest.

I used the money saved from freight to invest in ADSL and later broadband, and within a year or so the files were flying through.

In the latest Newsmedia Outlook 2009, the idea of bandwidth is discussed as something that media executives and leaders need to embrace. Do they have the bandwidth to cope with the fast moving, transitional newspaper market that we find ourselves in? The report’s author, Earl Wilkinson defines it as “slang for the ability to perform multiple tasks”.

The current newspaper environment of constant change, dramatic revenue losses and the shift by readers to online is a mighty elephant for executives to chew over, while at the same time producing newspapers – often daily – and strategising for future success.

But there is no way we can expect that elephant to go down the straw as a whole. It has to be minced up and an enormous amount of trust placed in the idea that it will come out the other end, rebuilt, and still recognisable as an elephant.

Putting faith in this process gives us a time advantage. If we wait for the whole elephant to be sent via freight, we may have greater control, but we risk discovering we’ve left it too late - that the market for elephants has totally dried up and everyone has moved on.

Ever since that fateful day of 64 pages down a 56kb line, “bandwidth” has been part of my vernacular. It’s the word used for those days when you have 147 things on your to do list. You know realistically that you’ll only get maybe 20 of them sorted. But deciding not to think about the rest at all is just not an option. If you do, one of the 127 will jump up and bite you - badly.

But here is the other thing about bandwidth – that the more you jam that elephant down the straw, the more the straw stretches. Just as our 56kb became ADSL and then later broadband, bandwidth expands the more you use it - and the more you invest in it.

First published in the INMA Ideas magazine, 2008. www.inma.org