Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I’m Neil.
And I’m Sam.
If you’re old enough to remember the early days
of dial-up internet then you’ll know the unforgettable
sound of the ‘handshake’, the clicks and squeaks
your computer made as it struggled to connect
to the internet through the telephone line.
Yes, I remember that strange noise! Dial-up
internet was slow and websites took forever
to load. And because you couldn’t use both
the internet and the telephone at the same time,
this was usually followed by someone shouting,
“Get off the computer, I’m making a phone call!”
In the thirty years since then, the internet has
changed dramatically. Fibre optics and
broadband have created superfast internet
speeds and an interconnected online world,
where physical distances between people are
no longer a barrier to communication -
a situation expressed in the phrase, the global village.
But take a closer look and you’ll still find
people around the world with a slow
connection or no internet at all. In this programme
we’ll be finding out how some communities
are working together to fix their internet
connection problems for the benefit of local
people. And, of course, we’ll be learning some
new vocabulary too.
But before that I have a question for you, Sam.
We’ve been talking about the early days of the
internet, but do you know the name of the first
ever internet browser, the engine for searching
websites? Was it:
a) Ask Jeeves?
b) WorldWideWeb?
c) Yahoo?
I’ll guess it was c) Yahoo.
OK, Sam. We’ll find out the answer later.
You might think its people living in the most
remote and isolated places with the greatest
difficulty getting online, but that’s not always
true. Even here in the UK people struggle to connect,
including BBC radio listener, Katie, who
explained her problem to BBC World Service
programme, Digital Planet:
Hi, I’m Katie. I live in Dorset in England.
Our internet can be quite spasmodic here,
and I think that that’s due to most of our
underground cabling is very old and somewhat
dodgy, tatty, and needs replacing.
Katie lives in Dorset, a rural part of south-west
England. She describes her internet connection
as spasmodic – suddenly working but only for
a short time and not in a regular way.
She thinks this is because her internet cables
are dodgy, slang for bad or untrustworthy.
A dodgy internet connection might be irritating,
but in other parts of the world the consequences
can be more serious. Aamer Hayat is farmer who
lives in the Pakistani Punjab, one of the country’s
most fertile regions, but also one of the least
connected. His village is a three-hour drive
from the nearest town, and he can’t make a
phone call, even with 2G.
For Aamer, basic weather information like
knowing when rain is coming can mean the
difference between his crops succeeding or failing.
Without the internet he doesn’t have a reliable
weather report, so the villagers decided to
build their own fifty-metre-high telephone
transmission tower, linking a network of five
villages to the internet. Here is Aamer talking
to BBC World Service programme, Digital Planet…
We used to do conventional farming like just
getting information from word-of-mouth.
Now, I’m using the latest technologies to have
gadgets available with us and taking information
right from the horse’s mouth through internet
and the technology we have in our hands.
So, this is what I’m doing in my farm practices.
Before the community-built tower brought the
internet to his village, Aamer got his weather
report by word-of-mouth - information passed
on by people telling each other.
Now, there’s stable internet that works thanks
to a tower high enough to pick up a telephone
signal which it then sends into the villages via
solar-powered receivers – a type of gadget,
meaning a small, electronic device which
does something useful.
This means Aamer now gets his weather report
straight from the horse's mouth, an idiom meaning
from a reliable source, or from someone who
knows what they’re talking about. The internet
brings reliable climatic information, which
means a good harvest not just for Aamer and
his family, but for all the families living in the
five connected villages.
It’s a great example of community action, and
of people looking after each other – something
which may have been lost since the early, idealistic
days of the internet. And speaking of the early
internet, it’s time to answer my question.
Remember, I asked you for the name of the
very first internet browser.
I guessed it was c) Yahoo. So, was I right?
You were… wrong, I’m afraid, Sam. Way back before
Google, the first internet browser was called the
WorldWideWeb - invented by none other than
cyber legend, Tim Berners-Lee, who, I think,
would be pleased to hear about Aamer’s
community internet.
Yes. Right, let’s recap the vocabulary we’ve
learnt about internet connections between
people living at a physical distance in the
modern world, something described as the
global village.
If your internet is spasmodic, it’s irregular,
stopping then suddenly working for a short time.
In other words, it’s dodgy, a slang word meaning
bad or unreliable
If you know something by word-of-mouth, it’s been
passed verbally from person to person. Whereas if
you hear it from the horse’s mouth, it’s come directly
from a reliable source of information.
And finally, a gadget is a small, electronic device
with a useful purpose. Once again our six minutes
are up. Bye for now!
Bye!