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Beating the FIFO drum: get in first, get out first with new tech

The good thing about being first to use a new technology is often that you can jump the queue. And we all like to do that -- especially when the queue in question is at one of life's biggest irritations: airport security.

It was like that when the Channel Tunnel opened. For the first few months, it was possible to pretty much arrive and drive. Not only was the system free from queues, the prices were keen too. Clearly the business was in customer acquisition mode, and pitched its tariffs accordingly.

But then the service became increasingly popular, as the news spread and no-one died, and soon it became like most of the rest of the cross-Channel services: crowded and prone to delays.

What's more the prices went up. OK so the company running the tunnel is in dire straits, financially, but all this goes to demonstrate is that common solutions prevail in a capitalist economy.

Getting closer to home, as it were, the same was true of broadband. Early adopters and trialists got fast, clean feeds, with excellent technical support as the number of customers was low and BT was keen to shake out the bugs early on. I was on a 2Mbit/sec line in 1997, for example.

Now we're seeing the same phenomenon being repeated with biometric checks at the airport. We learn this week that air travellers have, apparently, backed the use of biometric data as a means of identification following trials at Dubai and Hong Kong.

Using a combination of fingerprints and iris scanning, the average time to enrol a traveller was seven minutes and it took just 17 seconds to get through the self-service border clearance gate, according to a news report. Passengers were obviously delighted to get through the quagmire of security ahead of everyone else.

But, leaving aside whether or not their personal biometric data are being held securely -- and you can bet this issue wasn't discussed with them -- you can imagine what happens when the system goes live. The lines connecting airports to a central passenger database get clogged, the server bogs down, and the scanning equipment, which works fine for a handful of people, starts to become unreliable when asked to work flat-out 24/7.

What happens then is that the lines back up as the numbers of security staff have been slashed -- and we're back to the same old routine, only worse, as no-one can find the specialists whose job it is to keep it all working 100 per cent.

As with so many other initiatives, the end user experience might be great at first, but just wait until everyone's using it...