Latest Update from Cumbria County Council
08:32 in News by Louis Mosley
Here’s the latest from the County website:
The County Council has been asked to take on the role as responsible body for the Accessible Cumbria (superfast broadband) project in Cumbria, by Broadband Development UK (BDUK).
The project aims to develop opportunities’ for businesses and communities to develop and thrive in Cumbria. For that reason we are working with communities and businesses to develop the model that best delivers improvement to those communities.
We recognise the golden opportunity this represents for the communities of Cumbria and are keen to support it. There is a financial commitment from the County Council and for that reason the councillors will consider the matter formally at the end of March.
Our key thinking has been informed by discussions with residents, businesses and may yet change in the future dependent upon feedback that the County Council receives prior to the decision in the meeting at the end of March.
The discussions with BDUK to date have focussed on two things.
How do we get the best value out of the money we have been promised?
How do we ensure that any rationing is fair?
How do we get the best value out of the money we have been promised?
A strategic fibre to the property (FTTP) solution is probably the least effective way of maximising the value from the money available to us. It would be expensive and therefore only benefit a small part of the population. There are clearly various degrees of enthusiasm and expertise in our communities which would also be shunned by the FTTP approach.
One of the recurring themes from several of the community workshops councillors have attended is “concentrate on the backhaul”. If we can provide a community point of presence then a wide range of approaches can be adopted by the community to deliver their own broadband.
To minimise the cost of that backhaul we intend to take advantage of our own need to procure a network provider and the assets that we own in CLEO (Cumbria and Lancashire Education Online) to rationalise all this down to one service where points of presence for community use can be provided through schools, libraries and local authority buildings as a first call.
This can be provided through our own procurement and does not need large amounts of BDUK money. There are, however, plenty of communities that do not have a school, library or local authority building and the BDUK funding would be used to extend beyond that current network out to community groups. We are confident that this can be done and still protect the service required by schools.
Evidence suggests that there is a significant amount of unused capacity in the school network which would be utilised without impacting on school usage. In addition, use in school and use at home is largely synchronous and so deployment of appropriate technologies can ensure that bandwidth is switched when demand requires it. This could further enhance the capacity outside of school times without being detrimental to schools or domestic and business users. This switching is a cost above what the County Council needs to invest for our own purposes and so would be the start of the BDUK work.
In this way we will maximise the value from the existing public sector network and maximise the impact of the BDUK funding. As well as utilising the CLEO network we recognise that by leasing this to a supplier it has commercial value in itself. Therefore in the bidding process, we anticipate that potential suppliers will come up with funding of their own thereby extending the amount of work that we can do.
This explains how we maximise the number of points of presence in the communities. Beyond that point of presence we will look to establish a ’Quality Guild’ of suppliers that offer services ranging from supply of parts through to a full service. The criteria for gaining acceptance onto this Quality Guild will be established with the help of the coordinators who represent community broadband across Cumbria.
This Quality Guild will then allow each community to decide their own level of expertise/enthusiasm and match that against a suitable supplier. We believe this fulfils the two tenets of Big Society: the right to choose and the obligation to pay. There is no free broadband. The funds will be used to ensure that the rate the community pays is competitive.
How do we ensure any rationing is fair?
Even with the gap funding model outlined above which we believe can be delivered, the current level of funding will mean choices need to be made as part of the pilot phase. We are currently preparing papers for consideration at council as to how the allocation would be made. The following criteria are being considered:
Index of multiple deprivation ,including accessibility domain
Opportunity for business development and employment growth
A “not spot “ or area of poor broadband coverage with market failure
Different levels of community engagement i.e. fully engaged and active; variable interest but where opportunity is alive; little or unexplored capacity
Different topographies, geography, settlement types i.e. Deep rural - market town and
hinterland - urban fringe.
Opportunity to test different and innovative technologies.
We have also started to identify broadband coordinators to represent community groups who will have a say in the governance of this project. This is a complex situation and the results of the procurement and degree of gap funding will also have an impact on how far we can go.
I hope this shows that we have done a lot of the planning and thinking necessary to get this off the ground to the maximum advantage for all of Cumbria. BDUK acknowledge that our plan is innovative and deliverable.
We are also lobbying through our MPs for BDUK to make a statement about any intentions for Cumbria beyond the pilot phase but as yet there has been no firm commitment.
Work on procuring the points of presence is in accordance with BDUK requirements of a European procurement. This does take a little time but does ensure maximum value for the investment. None of the BDUK money goes into managing the process. BDUK expect that we will pick up that bill – which they have done by combining it with its own procurement of ICT services. For that reason we expect the final shape to be known at the end of the year with deployment during spring summer 2012.
Universal Service
Our vision for the future is to see the whole of Cumbria connected to high speed broadband internet in line with the government’s commitment to deliver a Universal Service in broadband, at a speed of 2 Megabits per second, by no later than 2012.
We see this as the absolute minimum service and reflects the feedback and concern we have received from some communities. There are parts of the County that have no broadband at all. These communities are concerned that if we focus on the easy to upgrade areas then they will get left even further behind. The County Council is clear that the 2mb universal service will be exceeded and the challenge for any supplier is how much they can deliver for the money and still ensure a minimum of 2mb.
We value your views and they have had an effect on moulding our thinking to date and they will in the future.
Please contact your local Parish Council or Broadband Hub Co-ordinator with any thoughts or responses to this statement.
CCC will be meeting with coordinators in March to collect views and give information on any further developments. Updates will appear on these web pages when available.
A list of Hub coordinators will be available shortly.
Glad the CC is clear that the 2Mbps USC is to be exceeded. That rules out BET then.
The biggest worry from all this is that hub co-ordinators do not have the necessary knowledge to see through the BT multimillion publicity machine and the hype. Choose the co-ordinators well. This is not a job for the boys, this is going to make or break this project. We can’t allow public money to be used to patch up the old phone network. Whatever we build has to be futureproof. For the next generation. Remember the lessons of project access.
chris
Just as a matter of interest, rather than ask for a FOI request, does anyone know if the people involved in project access are still involved in this new initiative?
Chris - no need for FOI’s, just pick up the phone! Talk with Alan Cook at the County Council on 01228221002.
Chris has queried if telcos can get state aid.
This might help - http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:52009XC0930(02):EN:NOT
What do we want from a Local PoP ? Location independent internet transit at a fixed price per Mbit/s per month perhaps. Gigabit ethernet copper and fibre connection options. IP addressing and other services required to make internet transit feasible.
As well as schools and other public buildings there are telephone exchanges, mobile base stations, microwave / radio masts, existing fibre infrastructure and Openreach “street access” product to give you a hardened NTE at the roadside.
Should notspots and <2M spots be priority to the extent of taking all the funding, half, three quarters ???
Yes Phil. If funding does the hardest bits first, the rest will be easy. The whole point of the funding is for notspots, not to help the incumbent do the cherry picking. I can’t help but think that the council is losing the plot, and the money will be wasted. Just like it was with project access. Getting the urban areas on cabinets is not a futureproof solution, but that is what will happen, making donuts and the digital divide even wider. We won’t get this chance again. Let us learn from the past and get it right this time. Get fibre out to the rural areas and let new businesses use it to build community networks. Cybermoor and Great Asby would be world famous by now if they only had access to decent backhaul at an affordable price. Communities can JFDI, many are ready to start. If the funding can get them a dumb pipe then they can do the rest, or if they can’t there are many who can help them. All the incumbent wants to do is keep us all on phone lines. For infinity. I don’t blame them, that is where they make their brass, but we can do IT better. With a leg up from BDUK we can break the mould.
http://5tth.blogspot.com/2011/03/state-aid-guidelines.html
re backhaul - what do they pay and what would they like to pay?
Important question.
Document!
http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/BDUK_Local_Broadband_Template_Spring.pdf
This update contains a mixture of encouraging and worrying messages.
Encouraging to see a commitment to community points of presence and the use of public service networks to achieve this but I think CCC will need to render their share of CLEO independent of the Lancashire/BT strategic partnership to make this happen.
Worrying to see an aspiration to deliver USCplus across the whole of Cumbria as the jam will get spread very thinly. Talk of rationing is not relevant if this is primarily a pilot project, the very nature of which is to focus on specific locations and solutions in order to answer specific questions.
Worrying to see FttP publicly dismissed as too expensive when in the more remote parts of the county, combined with wireless, it may be the only viable means of delivering a solution.
And I remain confused and despondent about the hub co-ordinator stratagem. Apparently these people are in the process of being recruited yet to my knowledge no systematic attempt has been made to inform all potential community broadband groups of the initiative nor have the role of the hub co-ordinator or the method of ensuring effective representation been properly defined.
But we’re not giving up by any means……!
It looks like mission creep, the £10m pilot is morphing into a Cumbria BDUK bid more suited to the Spring 2011 £50m call for proposals.
@Chris: Wasn’t Marie Fallon involved with Project Access? I heard that somewhere.
@Phil: It NEEDS to be Dark Fibre going back to a central point. I suggest Shap as it can then take a route to Manchester / London where IP transit can be purchased. Somebody could then come in at Shap and sell IP transit at that level rather than Manchester. Few reasons for this :-
1. If Mbps is mentioned, it is a managed service that BT offer. Because of state aid rules, it would mean that CCC have to sell at BT prices. If this is the case, community projects wouldn’t work as purchasing the required amount costs too much.
2. Dark Fibre speed is determined by the equipment you choose to put at either end meaning the bottleneck is the amount of IP transit you purchase.
3. This gives you greater control over IP addressing and allows you to do things like issue a static or multiple static IPs to subscribers.
It’s a bit of a Tebbit leap to suggest that Mbits/s means it’s a BT product, the price I used is a 3rd party selling bandwidth on the publicly funded Fibrespeed network in Wales. It’s comparable with what Chris was talking about for Lancaster RDPE transit. It exists today.
If a village pump is to be easy to hook up to for diverse users then dark fibre presents additional barriers to entry, IMHO. Make it an internet transit point.
Can someone answer the question as to how the Co-ordinators are being recruited, have seen nothing in the local papers or trade journals!! Hope it does not mean ‘jobs for the boys’ again! We must not lose this opportunity for the County.
http://www.cumbria.gov.uk/broadband/involved.asp
” In South Lakeland, it had been decided that each Local Area Partnership will be asked to nominate a Hub Co-ordinator.”
“The Upper Eden Community Plan Group has also nominated a person”
and so on. Why not put yourself forward to:
Community Engagement lead on the project: [email protected] Phone: 01539 713 435
@Phil: Sorry, shouldn’t of mentioned BT there but dark fibre is what it needs to be really. If you look into what Chris and Miles have to pay for their connections, it is REALLY expensive. This is because they have to sell it at the same price as BT would otherwise there would be a state aid objection. This is why we need dark fibre so we don’t end up paying £100+ per Mbps per month.
My idea is to take dark fibre from all communities back to Shap but charge them the same price regardless of distance. Communities that want it all laid on for them can go with a company such as NextGenUs which is a CIC and includes CIC benefits. Communities that want to DIY can connect back to switches and in turn to a router that connects to the dark fibre. At the other end, companies could be offering IP transit services making the whole thing cost effective for communities. It also gives full management of the IP addressing which is important if serving businesses.
I don’t see how they are going to get around state aid without doing it this way or charging a fortune.
” This is because they have to sell it at the same price as BT ” – they don’t, this is a myth. It may reflect a management decision or may be a “reason” people give out in their defence but I do not believe it to be true.
As evidence for my position I again offer the prices over the publicly funded Fibrespeed network – 21 Mbps to 30 Mbps @ £ 22 per Mbps per month http://www.hostinguk.net/iptransit.asp
State Aid has occurred already in building the thing. If there is no ongoing subsidy there is no State Aid argument. In any case a legitimate objective of State Aid ( aid that is compatible with Article 87(3)(c) of the EC Treaty ) is to reduce local prices to those found in major cities. This was the basis of the Fibrespeed project which includes wholesale services http://ec.europa.eu/eu_law/state_aids/comp-2005/n131-05.pdf
Dark fibre has its merits but so does an IP transit service delivered locally at ethernet level, and best of all the two aren’t mutually incompatible. In effect it’s the ducting that is the “only build one” asset.
” This is because they have to sell it at the same price as BT ” - they don’t, this is a myth. It may reflect a management decision or may be a “reason” people give out in their defence but I do not believe it to be true.
As evidence for my position I again offer the prices over the publicly funded Fibrespeed network - 21 Mbps to 30 Mbps @ £ 22 per Mbps per month http://www.hostinguk.net/iptransit.asp
State Aid has occurred already in building the thing. If there is no ongoing subsidy there is no State Aid argument. In any case a legitimate objective of State Aid ( aid that is compatible with Article 87(3)(c) of the EC Treaty ) is to reduce local prices to those found in major cities. This was the basis of the Fibrespeed project which includes wholesale services http://ec.europa.eu/eu_law/state_aids/comp-2005/n131-05.pdf
Dark fibre has its merits but so does an IP transit service delivered locally at ethernet level, and best of all the two aren’t mutually incompatible. In effect it’s the ducting that is the “only build one” asset.