Why can’t we send files at the same speed as we download them? Workers in the graphics industry, printers, designers, publishers and the like, have been at the cutting edge of data-comms. The industry was arguably the first to become digital in the 1980’s, largely on the back of the Apple Macintosh systems of their time and forward-looking publishers such as Eddie Shah. Since then it has needed to transport huge amounts of data.

At first this could only be done out of house via floppy disks and soon, various types of removable or transportable hard disks too over the role. Apple abandoned the floppy nearly a decade ago but in the old days it was possible to put an 8 page newsletter onto a 1.4MB floppy because the images were added separately. Scanners were then so expensive they remained in the multi-thousand pound pricing point. As their price dropped, designers could take over even more of the page layout role and make yet another group of workers redundant. Typesetters, compositors, film planners, plate-makers and proof readers had already gone, now the scanner operators were next as flatbed scanners dropped in price and photography went digital.

The end result is as we see today with full-colour publications being created entirely digitally. Recent jobs done here have been multi-gigabyte in size and have to be transported via hard disks or DVDs and even then with images compressed as dreadfully damaging jpeg instead of the preferred LZW compressed tiff format.

Smaller jobs can just as easily be sent electronically and have been so, first via modem for a few megabytes, then ball-bustingly expensive ISDN for up to 100MB and now ADSL and cable for anything up to a gigabyte. However, it is only recently that upload speeds have increased from a miserly quarter or half megabit and even now, apart from hugely expensive SDSL, upload speeds are throttled back. It seems as though the data-comms business has been holding us back for the last two decades.

If ADSL is capable of delivering the much fabled “up to” 8, 16 and 24 Mbps for downloads, why can’t it be made available for uploads? I would be very happy to pay for two lines, one for incoming and one for outgoing connections, both running at the same maximum speed.

The broadband suppliers are currently charging around £20 to £30 per month for a business Max service or similar. Doubling this, for the same speed up and down would be reasonable, as would a cap on outgoing data to weed out the peer-to-peer junkies. Then my industry would be able to progress.