The factory itself is gone now, it is a housing estate, and I haven't seen the brand "Mother's Pride" for years either, but anyway, I was employed by Mother's Pride as a "sifter". This was the old Exwick factory in about 1977.

There were big cauldrons on three wheels, you pushed the cauldron under the sifting machine, then walked over to the flour store, picked up a 1 cwt (51 Kg) bag of flour, on your shoulder because it needed to be that height to tip into the sifter, and walked back to the sifting machine, then with your other hand you grabbed the string sealing the top of the bag and tore it, tipping the flour into the sifter.

When it was done sifting you pushed it under the water tap, press the button once and (from memory) about 13 kg of water was poured in to the cauldron, while this was happening you dropped in two big bricks of fat, a small block of yeast and a small block of something else that was probably salt and other trace ingredients.

When that was done you pushed the whole mess under the mixing machine, unless as happened to me on my first day there was a cracked tile on the floor, in which case 150 lbs of bread mix goes shooting across the factory floor...no worries, scoop up as much as you can and spread it into the next four or five loads.

If you're making bread rolls, and I was, you took the mixed dough from the mixing machine and pushed it to the top of the production line, you lean into the cauldron, dripping sweat profusely, with one hand grabbing a handful of "dough" which has a consistency like chewing gum, and with the other hand, holding a very sharp knife, you slice a chunk off, and slam this into the loading drawer of the roll making machine, repeat and repeat, the machine has to be fed.

Of course this was 12 hour shifts, so by now I'm 8 hours into my shift and dog tired, I made a lot of mistakes, like carrying the flour, I started the day carrying the nearest bags, and by the end of the day I was having to carry from the furthest, none of which helped my stamina levels, so the inevitable happened and the knife hand got to close to the grabbing hand and I had a nice cut across my fingers... I nipped down to the first aid station and they sent me back to work, explaining that if they gave me a plaster it would come off in the dough and some housewife would see it, but nobody would see a little bit of blood.

At that time each loaf was sealed in a plastic bag, and the plastic bag was sealed with a small wire twist on the neck. These wire twists were colour coded, so you could tell be looking at the colour of the wire twist what age the bread was, so imagine my surprise when the lorry drivers loading bread for the supermarkets and are handed bags full of coloured wire twists, yes madam, this bread is fresh.

I quit that job at the end of the first day. Not because it was bloody hard work, it was, but because it was bloody awful, and I never again ate anything with the Mother's Pride brand.

Mother's Pride (sic) was a commodity, and just like the word "knife" has a silent "k" the word "commodity" has a silent "just a " preceding it, and the thing about a commodity is every single person on that production line is in one way or another interfering with it and therefore somehow adulterating it.

Now it may seem strange to be reading about 1970's bread factories in an article that purports to be about 21st century ISP's, but, the bread factory analogy is actually spot on.

One of the fundamental principles of a factory is the whole production line thing going on. As sifter I was at the head of the queue, I *had* to go fast enough to keep the hoppers at the beginning of "my" production line filled with dough, and everyone else down the line had that same imperative.

For the ISP this is keeping the pipe open, stopping the production line is loss of connectivity, and that is bad, so you keep the production line going, no matter what, and if the "product" is liberally flavoured with crap from the floor (only a short walk from the toilet block) and my blood and sweat before it even gets into the beginning of the production line, well, who's going to notice given the sheer volume of dough going through that line in one 12 hour shift?

Whereas the start up ISP I mentioned, Mark was in effect the small baker, if you went into the shop and he had sold out of bread, too bad, come back tomorrow, but as soon as it is a commodity supply is always sufficient, supermarkets never run out of bread, they prefer to throw it away.

It is just a commodity, after all.

So the ending comment from the last article that started this one, you ain't seen nothing yet when it comes to traffic shaping etc.

Well, the loaf of bread is your pipe, bandwidth you didn't use yesterday is gone forever, tomorrow's bandwidth doesn't even exist yet, so it is all about establishing a brand and loyalty here.

You can buy wholemeal organic full grain bread, or economy sliced white, but it all comes from the same factories of one or two major bakers, and they know that all that matters is the image that they can invoke in your mind and associate with the product, H^H^H^ commodity, because sure as god made little green apples you WILL be buying one of their products, just like you WILL be buying some sort of bread (unless you are a minority kook, and who the hell cares about that) every day, you WILL be consuming some sort of bandwidth every day.

The iconic Hovis image, part of Rank Hovis McDougall, the same people that owned the old Exwick bakery.

So the commoditisation and marketing of the product supercedes the actual product itself in significance, and the product, in this case your pipe, becomes no more than a vehicle for all the marketing to piggyback upon and establish brand loyalty.

As far as the internet goes this means that, for example, the current state of play here in the UK with the almost entirely ficticious brand that is Virgin Media, which is just a branding excercise, the reality is that at present the most accurate thing we can say is "we ain't seen nothing yet."

Google's job is not search, Google's job is promoting the Google brand at every possible opportunity.

Virgin Media's job is not providing connectivity, Virgin's job is promoting the Virgin brand at every possible opportunity.

It is worth remembering that just as RHM (Rank Hovis McDougall) offered many types of bread, but no actual choice, RHM did not sell a single loaf direct to the consumer, instead it was all about strategic partnerships with retail outlets such as supermarkets.

And so it becomes apparent that it is a marketing inevitability that the only possible immediate future of domestic pipes is to serve as a commodity vehicle for these market forces, and so just as one lone sifter bled and sweated into the dough, before the next station on the commodity production line did their bit, and so on, each station in your domestic pipe will bleed Phorm into the dough, sweat targeted advertising into it, mask spillages by spreading the effluent out amongst other traffic shaped mixes, and the bottom line is it will work.

The statistical mean loaf of bread today is further from the real thing than it was in the seventies, and the statistical mean domestic pipe is further from the real thing than it was in the nineties, and there is absolutely nothing on the horizon to threaten this.

In a sense the title of these two articles is misleading, as the reader is going to assume the question is being asked, "What would make a good 21st century ISP" and they are going to assume that their opinions on the matter are worth something.

In truth the title of these two articles is more accurate, it lays out the facts and lays out the future, it tells you what a good 21st century ISP will look like, and that will be the child of a Virgin Media, the child of a RHM, the child of a Tesco, the child of marketers.

In 1999 (from memory) Scott McNealy said "You have no privacy, get over it"

Larry Ellison said "The privacy you cherish so much is mostly an illusion."

Guy Fawkes (sic) says "The days when your pipe was a service are gone. It's neither your pipe nor a service any more."

bootnote

Next Monday, 28th July 2008, NTL Business are turning up to connect me.

Having been online since the days of the BBS and Fido, I now have to, for the first time ever, cease being a private individual and become a Corporate individual in order to purchase a pipe as a service rather than a commodity.

It is impossible to overstate just how profound this is. The private individual cannot buy a clean pipe, the corporate individual can, I must either cede my flesh and blood person status or cede my ability to buy a clean pipe.

As a business customer I have the right to a clean pipe, free from Phorm and traffic shaping and all that crap..... I type this and think of the original Declaration of Independence... but back then they hadn't invented the whole idea of the Corporate individual per se, and I don't mean the company man, I mean the company as a legal entity.