The glow of artificial light at 5.30 on a dark, wet winter morning might not seem like a cause for cheer. But, with 75 MPH winds over Fife last night, I was expecting the usual storm routine: find the old phone, plug it in - or if the phone lines were down go outside the stone walls - and call Scottish Power’s faults service. Then, if the electricity was back on by the time I got back in the evening, spend half an hour resetting the heating controller and reminding the microwave that it has been used before. While these are relatively minor inconveniences, for others the implications could be more serious: an elderly neighbour literally needed power to breathe. He really needed to get his emergency generator up and running.

While Scottish Power’s engineers have improved rural distribution over the last few years, any new confidence in a continuous uninterrupted power supply might, apparently, be short lived. James Enck has a link in his EuroTelcoblog to this posting about an impending power shortage in the UK by 2015. James asks how much of an issue this will be for the telecoms industry and how it fits with the service oriented vision where all your stuff is stored elsewhere and accessed through Web services? It’s a good question - and possibly a huge opportunity. It’s a fairly safe bet that telcos will get first dibs on the available power. Anyway, most ardent telco bashers admit that providing a reliable communications infrastructure is part of the incumbents’ core competency. A common criticism is that they can only make money in the presence of scarcity. Well, here is the new scarcity - reliability. What better use for the connected home than to have it running when you get back to it - other than keeping you alive inside it?