Defining the Digital Hub
15:30 in News by Louis Mosley
What did Jeremy Hunt mean when he announced last week that every rural community in Britain would get a “digital hub” by 2015? Ever since, the fells and dales of Cumbria – not to mention the county’s blogosphere – have been humming with different definitions.
ABOVE: Peter Smith, Lance Greenhalgh, Freddy Markham and Charles Paxton of the Lyvennet Valley Broadband Group meet on Friday in the Tufton Arms in Appleby to discuss the definition of a “Digital Hub”.
But what do communities want?
Ultimately, it will be up to Cumbria County Council to define the “Digital Hub” as part of the tender document that it will publish next year. But the needs and requirements of communities should shape this definition.
“Digital Hubs” will be built with public subsidy, so it is only fair that communities are given a say in how this money is spent.
The risk is that Cumbria County Council will use BDUK’s £10m to subsidise a supplier to run fibre to exchanges and cabinets closed to the community (FTTC), with cabinets being re-defined as “Digital Hubs”. These cabinets would be the property of the supplier and no community would have the right to use them to extend a fibre network to the premises (FTTP).
This would dash the hopes of communities that want to run FTTP. As Miles Mandelson noted in the comments:
“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.”
So what are the alternatives?
As a first option, communities could demand that suppliers install cabinets that are FTTP enabled. Suppliers would be expected to undertake to work with communities to extend FTTP wherever there is demand for it, using community action - demand aggregation, concessions on wayleaves, self-dig - to ‘gap fund’ the roll-out. In this model, communities would work alongside the supplier to lower the cost of FTTP and supplier would own the fibre network.
As a second option, communities could insist that in return for public subsidy for FTTC, suppliers should give communities fair and non-discriminatory access to cabinets, enabling communities to extend their own fibre network from the cabinet to premises. Communities could choose to go even further by demanding that public money is used to build “Digital Hubs” that would be community owned and run, as is the case in Great Asby.
What would be disadvantages or hidden dangers of these approaches? What would be the costs and benefits of community ownership of “Digital Hubs”? How can we use “Digital Hubs” to meet the ambitions we set out in the Eden Declaration?
If communities are to play a role in shaping this definition, they must join the debate now. As Aileen West noted in the comments, we must break out of the “mindset which we have experienced time and again to the effect that ‘someone’ will be responsible for getting the fast connections we want”.
Communities must decide and do it for themselves. JFDI!
Hello,
Having misquoted Sir Winston Churchill in a previous post it is time to even up the score: this time I’m going to quote, not misquote though. Michael Foot, who sadly died on the 3rd March this year, said.
“Assess and describe the challenges by all means, BUT DON’T CONFUSE ANALYSIS WITH ACTION. The one must lead to the other if it is to be useful to people.”
To put it bluntly if we are to achieve our goal then we have got to ‘do action’
Daniel Heery of Cybermore told all the broadband champions who attended Reghed that the process upon which we were about to embark in his experience was…
“10% technology and 90% politics, and make enemies of no one as you may need their help later to complete the project.”
Wise words which we may have missed in our headlong rush.
We elect our MP and our Councillors, and then we sit back. We do not seek to praise them for their dedication to the complex Social Political and Economic tasks we expect them to perform, the hours they spend in meetings which write minutes and waste hours, or days, to try and meet conflicting aims and objectives.
Please correct us if we are wrong but we only know of one county councillor on the site Duncan Fairbairn whom Aileen directly asked to join, and who is as keen as any of us to achieve our goal, and is broad band champion for Aikton.
If each broadband champion took time to persuade their own elected County, or District Councillor onto the site and undertook to keep that person up to date with what the odd jargon filled post meant, if they were to ‘digitally’ walk the Councillor through the difficulties each parish faces to square their own Parish size social and economic dreams, with the social objectives they hope to achieve with the help of that Councillor from Town or Country side it would be a start.
Their Present economic problems are massive, we believe broadband can save millions but they need to be shown how.
Please start here!
http://councilportal.cumbria.gov.uk/mgMemberIndex.aspx?FN=ALPHA&VW=LIST&PIC=0
None of us can say that Guy is not doing his best to be politically aware he suggested this afternoon you might like to look at his latest blog concerning BDUK who are another political body we have to keep on board.
http://www.fibrestream.co.uk/blog/
KgA&C
Yes, thanks for the reminder, it’s very important to keep in touch throughout the process. Even (maybe especially) when we are feeling our way forwards.
Re Colin’s comment I entirely agree that extracting maximum and lasting local value for whatever is being procured requires political engagement at all levels to be effective.
The true test of whether, as I fervently, Big Society can deliver the transformation of local service or fall flat in the face of Big Government will be to follow the money and see who is actually given the right to determine the future of telecoms, the 4th Utility, in Cumbria.
Broadband vouchers means power to the people - it is that simple!
Beyond the First Mile network for each community, there is the next requirement, namely how to connect each local community to the outside world.
The Digital Hub is one way of doing this and as currently mooted will more likely lead to enabling BT to offer its Digital Deadend of FttC than to create the space for community interest networks of the kind that NextGenUs is actively seeking support to build right now, independent of public subsidy.
There is a better way forwards and that is called Dark Fibre - direct strands of fibre optic cable that connect together a suitable internet exchange point e.g. in Carlisle with regular breakout points within striking distance of each local community.
G
The vouchers could be just the thing to stimulate sign-ups to a CIC community broadband project that might lead to more sustainable communities for many years to come.
I have spent many hours trying to talk to councillors. I end up talking to them eventually. They hear what I say, They then go back and talk to BT who quickly ridicule everything I have said. So who do they believe? A constituent who pays their wages and who elects them and who has a great need, or a fat cat telco with management qualified in spin and hype?
I do sympathise with the councillors, it is very difficult to be political in this day and age, and with so much to gain if we could only get decent connectivity. BT have so much to lose, that is the problem, they will fight tooth and nail to protect their copper cabal. No community can afford to run fibre if they don’t get access to affordable backhaul. Most communities will fall for the cabinet scam, leaving the final third out in the digital slow lane. Probably still on dial up, or BET which is glorified dial up and very costly to install and run. But try explaining it to a councillor, and then be a fly on the wall when the spin doctors say that copper is futureproof like Liv Garfield (a clone of Jen in the ITcrowd) did. All the newspapers and even the Beeb reported it word for word as if it was true. She also publicly stated that cabinets would not be revisited for upgrades. So that means your grandchildren will be fighting this battle in the years to come if we don’t win it now. We need to JFDI.
cyberdoyle - maybe people ridicule those who make wild incorrect statements amongst the sensible things they say and prefer to listen to professional companies, whoever they are.
Remember it’s the service people get, not how it gets there. And that needs to be over a minimum of 10M, which does imply fibre for longer distances.
40M is 345Gbytes per day. What will you do with that?!
Guy - can you please explain the voucher scheme in more detail.
Somerset. You keep missing the point. The point is that nobody wants to download gigabytes every day. They just want a futureproof connection for once and for all so they can get on with their lives. Only fibre can deliver it to them in the final third. The ‘professional companies’ like BT convince the councillors that BET and satellites are good enough for the peasants as long as the majority can get ‘superfast’ which will be down to 5 meg for many at the edges of towns. Anyway 40 meg is not NGA. It matters not whether it is in 2 years or 10 that we need 100meg or 1gig, the fact remains that the infrastructure we build now has to be able to do the job. If we fall for the cabinet trick all this work will be to do again, because the community networks will not get built. We were conned in 2003 when project access handed BT £20million to enable exchanges and provide broadband for cumbria. It didn’t. It just provided a connection for people close to exchanges. The rest remain to this day on dial up. The same thing will happen again if cabinets get the funding.