Britain’s Superfast Broadband Future: what do you think?
17:10 in News by Louis Mosley
A very important announcement was made this morning.
Jeremy Hunt MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, launched the government’s new broadband strategy: Britain’s Superfast Broadband Future, which outlines how the government plans to deliver its pledge of the best superfast broadband in Europe for Britain by 2015.
The document is packed with useful information and well worth reading. Chapter 1 outlines many of the benefits of having a superfast broadband connection. Chapter 3 is a quick run through of the technological options.
At the heart of the document is a government promise to give every rural community ‘a point to which fibre is delivered’, called a ‘digital hub’.
In return, the government asks that communities take the lead in stimulating demand for superfast broadband and, where necessary, extend and even build their own networks.
This is close to the deal offered in the Eden Declaration, but – as ever – the devil will be in the detail.
An important question remains unanswered: what exactly is a ‘digital hub’?
The document promises to put ‘the people who will eventually use the infrastructure in a position to shape it’. So, what do you think?
Our very own Lindsey says we should just re-write the strategy document before it’s too late.
Adrian Wooster, whom some of you may remember from the Rheged Conference, is more optimistic.
Tref thinks that the ‘digital hubs’ will simply be re-branded BT cabinets (FTTC). He’s afraid that this will shut out innovative competitors and leave consumers with a copper-based solution for a long time to come.
Charles Arthur in the Guardian thinks that until the government resolves the issue of the ‘fibre tax’ and gives other suppliers access to BT’s ducts and poles, the market will fail to deliver what the government wants.
So, now is our chance to ‘shape’ our ‘digital hubs’.
In the end, we’ll pay for them, so we better make sure that they are what we want and what we need.
Here is the relevant paragraph from the document to discuss:
4.4 BDUK will also explore the viability of a broadband community hub at a local level – which could provide the means of extending networks where the community will either take responsibility for the actual civil engineering of the network or take greater control over managing network elements. Networks can then be extended over time to provide enhanced access to broadband for individual premises in a variety of ways. For example, an operator’s cabinet can be equipped to support the splicing of fibre builds into the access network. Interfaces can be made available such that wireless networks or indeed community managed femtocells can be added to the network. The latter needs to be agreed with industry and is subject to sufficient demand and support by communities.
Some good ‘stuff’, but also some areas for concern. The government recognise the importance of broadband access, but I would rather they aim really high rather than look for alternative/easier ways to be able to claim a target was achieved. Next Generation Access is Fibre to the Home (FTTH). This is the only solution that can be considered future-proof and fit to be called the best broadband network in Europe when it reaches 99.9% of UK homes and premises. Anything less than fibre all of the way to the consumer is another stop-gap measure.
I think it is going to be a very useful initiative for a lot of people around the country. It’s all about people’s desired ratio of waiting time, expenditure and intended use of the speed. I haven’t read it all through yet, but I think that for many people FTTC may be a sufficiently useful step up from what we currently have to justify the half-measure if that half measure itself pays for a later upgrade to FTTH. It would be sad to end up paying the same amount or more for the lesser service and then have to pay more fairly soon to upgrade it to a speed that we find we really need. Here it would be useful to be able to compare the pricing options including the unusual, but potential scenario of communities swapping over en masse to future proof technology. I understand that 100% sign-up transforms the economics, but I haven’t seen the what-if mathematics of all this.
An important point raised at a meeting today was that this investment will last long into the future and even if we don’t think that we’ll take advantage of half the potential of very high speed access ourselves (and we could be proved wrong in this assumption), it is possible that our descendants will.
Normally, the longer you wait before you acquire anything high-tech, the more power you get for your pound, so people are predisposed to wait, but in the case of fast broadband, it appears that the sooner you get FTTH the longer you will have to benefit from having the best future-proof service, so it makes sense for us to aim for FTTH if we can and in the case of CICs the profits from the homes that are easy to connect will help bring service to the remoter homes and then start to boost community coffers. In the snakes & ladders analogy it seems best to climb the ladder that will take you closest to the winning square. It may seem a steeper climb, but you cut out all the encounters with snakes and would spend longer basking in the glow of top speed service. The BDUK fund and patient finance seem very necessary and any impediments such as fibre tax should probably be done away with in the interests of expediting lasting progress and aiming for quality of life enhancing developments.
It is very disappointing that documents like this contain very loose definitions such as:-
Broadband – A service or connection generally defined as being ‘always on’ and
providing a bandwidth greater than narrowband.
This is NOT the definition of broadband.
No definition of super fast broadband is attempted so we do not know what we are aiming at.
We are also in danger of looking like the days of vhf and uhf defining terms for “very”, “Super” and “Ultra” that will look silly in a few years time if not already. Fibre optics can already be used for transfer speeds of TerraBytes.
Surely we can agree some industry standard Levels or profiles that can be used as absolute measures for certain key parameters? I have worked on many such standards processes where this is common practice. This would enable direct comparison of technologies and cost benefits. Unfortunately many terms get reduced by marketing speak. Broadband is one casualty, High Definition is another - but that’s another story!
When I first read the speech I thought, Great, they have got IT. But then I read the full report and quickly realised they haven’t got IT at all.
They are trying to fob us off with cabinets.
Cabinets won’t be accessible for our home built networks to join. They will still deliver what passes for broadband through our copper phone lines. The more remote areas will get BET. BET is bonded copper pairs, so you will end up paying for two phone lines and still only get a meg. Or they will say we can have satellite. Funding will go to tender, and BT can always beat any tender because they already have the ducts and poles, wayleaves and exchanges.
“They” will say its an open and transparent process, but the poor dolts at the councils and RDAs will hand over our funding to the incumbent whose fault all this mess is. Just like in 2003 when they gave BT the money to put ‘all of cumbria’ online. What a joke that was. We must make sure it doesn’t happen again…
BT stated last week that anyone getting on to a cabinet AKA ‘infinitiy’ will not be revisited for an upgrade. Cabinets are bad news. We have to hold on to the dream here people. We need our own digital village pumps, so we can deliver a service to our communities. Nothing else will do. We only get one bite at the cherry, let us not allow our councils to fail at this. We want to be able to build our own infrastructure, because the incumbent has had 9 years to get 1st gen broadband to us and has failed. We will never get next gen unless we JFDI ourselves. Bring on rorysreivers. The battle lines have now been drawn. Man the pumps.
chris
FttC may a step up but it is not a step forward to NGA broadband. It’s BT’s way of tempting the purse-string-holders and their constituents to quickly and painlessly tick the box. So a message needs to be sent to the purse-string-holders that cabinets are fine if they function as digital village pumps that communities have open access to and can deploy as they see fit. If the cabinets are exclusively for onward connection to households by copper they cannot be regarded as fit for purpose. Copper has no place in NGA broadband. If it’s allowed to form part of the new infrastructure then it’s the generation after next that will have to sort the mess out.
Well said Miles. Totally agree.
chris
The NextGenUs delivery of the Digital Village Pump is all about the first mile - ie connecting all homes and businesses and public sector locations (e.g. schools) via Fibre 100% all the way to the community hub.
The clear and present danger is for this DVP to be instead treated as just another BT street cabinet and used, as Miles, Martin, Chris et al point out, to offer BT FttC which is a Digital Deadend - http://www.fibrestream.co.uk/2010/12/04/fibre-to-the-human-not-copper-to-the-customer/
BT have clearly stated that once a community gets FttC then there are no plans to upgrade to FttH - this a a purely commercial market-protection measure devoid of any credible technical rationale - http://www.fibrestream.co.uk/2010/11/30/bt-digital-drug-dealer/
If BT gets fundi ng from the taxpayer to subsidise FttC then it is game over for Cumbrian Communities and that would be a tragedy.
Two actions that would offer each local community with genuine choices:
1 - a set of DARK FIBRES back to Carlisle or Shap for example that are reserved for community benefit.
2 - broadband vouchers for each household and business to decide, with rewards for clubbing together on a parish, district and county level.
This latter approach is totally in tune with Big Society, devolved decision-making, participatory budgeting and community-led procurement.
Agree Guy.
But I don’t have much confidence in the procurement process. Look how Cornwall got conned out of their money. BT is a mighty power, but Cumbria can benefit simply because of its people. If they get their act together David can beat Goliath and we can have futureproof connectivity instead of copper crap. It is all up to us now…
Can we Do IT?
Yes We CanDoIT
chris
Yes, this is important.
This article in Cumberland News is irritating. It looks as if Marie Fallon is planning to do a ‘Cornwall’ on us. I’m afraid that I commented twice because the first one I submitted didn’t show up initially (it was just awaiting moderation) I thought that I had have another try.
http://www.cumberlandnews.co.uk/news/superfast-broadband-to-link-whole-of-cumbria-1.789156?referrerPath=home
I commented on that article too, I just hope we are wrong and Marie Fallon gets a few physics lessons and also remembers what the money was for in the first place. Otherwise it is mis-appropriation of funding?
this is how you build a digital village pump without funding http://bbc.in/ecN60h
but with funding we could do it even quicker, and do all of cumbria. If Lincolnshire can do it so can we. We can’t let the cabinets take over otherwise we will all be doing this job in another 20 years.
I don’t think that in my 15 years of campaigning for broadband I have ever felt this dispirited. You may not have heard of ‘broadband’ 15 years ago, but I had heard of T1 and E1 lines and was searching for them to connect my business in Wensleydale (no, you do *not* need a passport to visit!).
This latest plus the News and Star article by Nick leaves me utterly trashed. If we don’t know what we are seeking, we have no chance. And what Cumbria County Council, in my name and yours, right now, intend to spend money on, is not what is required.
If we see a repeat of Project Access, or another Commendium/Richard Walters waste of this money, I will sadly lay bets on Cumbria’s future in a bookie. And it will NOT be positive. And worse, I will win. Again.
This is not the way forward.
It seems to me, and obviously to many others, that the article in the Cumberland News was nothing other than a great big advert for BT sponsored by the County Council. It had very little to do with what I believe we are all seeking to achieve for rural Cumbria. I thnk that faster broaband is imperative, and although it is going to be a hard slog to get some parts of rural Cumbria online it will be an impossible slog if we allow the project to be hijacked by CCC in their enthusiasm to roll out better broadband to suit their own purposes. I was appalled to see the article being so complacent in its assumption that if the money was there then the ‘experts’ would waltz in and resolve all our problems. Not only is this not the case it is wholly counter-productive as it serves to reinforce a mindset which we have experienced time and again to the effect that ‘someone’ will be responsible for getting the fast connections we want. This only results in us losing out to the economically viable centres of population. I think that the inclusion of BT’s Race to Infinity in any of this conversation only serves to confirm the idea of many that they have done their bit by registering an interest after which the respondent can settle down and wait for a result. If anyone has ideas as to how we can motivate others to stop thinking this way it would be good for them to be shared please. There are so many things that the community could usefully do with a better connection. It must be time for us all to make sure that our elelcted representatives are totally behind the aspirations of the community and not of the big players quoted in the paper.
Obviously we have not seen any detailed proposals, but the article in Cumberland News is extremely worrying. It suggests that funding will be thinly spread and will then support more populated areas that should be viable without any subsidy. We must get the message through that anything less than fibre to the home/premises is not future-proof and will be poor use of tax-payers money. Secondly we must ensure that rural areas come first for once - see the excellent article by Charles Paxton in the Benefits of Broadband Group. Yes, towns need broadband too, but those of us in rural areas support (through taxes) services in towns that we can seldom, if ever, enjoy. This time the funding assistance from tax-payers should be focussed on the rural communities. Politicians must also recognise that a big compromise to get a little more for everybody in Cumbria will not be acceptable and will not gain the community support that could result in great things for Cumbria…
Hello John,
Please could you make a ‘ball park’ guess at the savings, if any in the economics of laying what ever sort of future proof Fibre optic cable along the NWR track, as mentioned in our last post, if the NWR engineers are going to lay their own fibre optic at the same time?
Does this make sense as an option?
We have posted the URL for the NWR map, which may help in your deliberations below.
http://rorystewart.co.uk/images/zoomify/3.html
You will probably not find it a problem to download.
Hi Colin, the additional cost depends on how it is done and what NWR choose to charge. At one level you could argue that if a community just required two fibres (one for send & one for receive) in a cable, and the cable is being installed anyway, then the increased cost is roughly that of the two fibres, and that is around 3 pence per metre per fibre.
NWR, and others, would argue that this is simplistic, and the reality is that with several communities it may be that a 96-fibre cable is specified rather than a 48-fibre cable just for NWR use. This will require a little more time to joint and so on, but these costs would be shared and so still not excessive unless somebody is seeking a large profit.
A big advantage of fibre (one of many) is that it is very thin/compact, and hence it is possible to get several in a cable without significantly changing the cable size or design. As a result, many telecoms companies build networks with spare fibres that can be sold or leased to others when there is demand.
If on the otherhand a new cable has to be installed, then the cost could be very significant as working along railways is not cheap. Although the installation is described as fibre over ground (FOG) by some, it is normally layed in a trough with lids or hung on the wall in stations and tunnels, and this limits space available.
Hope this helps a little.
Some well-placed anxiety and concern is being expressed here. I suggest that this is a political process rather than a rational process that we are witnessing. Rory, what political insights can you share with us and what reassurance can you give us that rationality will prevail?
Please don’t let us lose the good in pursuit of the perfect. I doubt if many householders will need 100mb plus to their homes, but we certainly need something a damn sight quicker than what is often delivered as “up to 8mb”.
The elephant in the room is the path from the cabinet, or wherever the main link to the service’s point of presence is, to the socket in the user’s wall.
It’s been the same issue since telephony infrastructure started to be used as a data network, and the major advances have been in clever technologies & networking protocols that have upped the data transmission rates through the elderly wires that most users are relying on today.
I doubt if there is any technology around which will up these rates by the orders of magnitude necessary for super fast broadband. If this so the local loop will have to be replaced. Multitudes of communities across Cumbria have to deal with this issue and it won’t be done cheaply if it is done piecemeal.
Hi Allan, I agree with your sentiment that improvement is progress however modest, but we may then be stuck with this level of service for many years to come. 10 years ago dial-up was fine, but now it really isn’t. To make use of future (and even some current) broadband services we will need much better than 10 Mb/s access, and this will need to be symmetrical. Things really are changing quickly and I believe many of us will need much higher speeds sooner than we may think. To my mind we must be ambitious and push for FTTH which will serve us well, long into the future. If FTTH does not happen then rural Cumbria will suffer and consequently all of Cumbria will suffer. I may be biased, as fibre optics is my business, but other countries are investing in FTTH and I believe this will prove a good investment for Cumbria and the UK.
Hi Allan, John,
Perhaps a helpful way to think of the pure glass path that FttH represents is that it is scaleable.
Fibre can be rate limited to dial-up speeds if wanted and can be driven to many thousands of Gbps too.
The key point is that as a basic infrastructure, fibre can carry pretty much whatever we throww at it simply by changing the lights and cameras at each end.
The analogy I often use between copper wire and fibre optic delivery to the home is that between canals and railways.
FttC is akin to putting a speed boat on a canal in an attempt to keep up with a train… the lock gates still need negotiating though!
And the copper wire bottleneck to the home is the equivalent of a lock-gate in that it introduces a physical limitation to the speed of getting from A to B
To extend the example, the asymmetric nature of copper-based broadband means information flows downstream much faster than upstream - with fibre the rates of flow are (or at least can) be equal both ways.
The value of this symmetry is that it puts more power in the hands of the customer to do with as they see fit.
In summary, FttH is the only future-proof way of delivering broadband and if there was no BT copper wire legacy being protected then there would be no debate on the matter.
Seems to me we need to find a way of engaging with Cumbria County Council to get our points across - there seems to be a deathly silence from that direction, other than a bit of megaphone communication via the Cumberland News.
I search in vain for an entrypoint on the Cumbria County Council website - maybe I’ve missed the vital link - if so, can someone point me in the right direction please.
Jeremy Hunt’s strategy document talks about “putting the people who will eventually use the infrastructure in a position to shape it”, and when talking about building broadband for rural areas says “Public authorities should work closely with lower tier authorities especially at neighbourhood level” .
So, Cumbria County Council, what’s your engagement plan - who, what, when,where, how?