Broadband Cumbria

Something important I forgot to include in the annotated version is – internet backhaul pricing!

The unit of cost measurement for internet connectivity is the £ per Mbps per month.
This is the cost to have available for use, 24 hours per day for a month, one Mbps of data transfer.
By way of example if 1 Mbps was used to full capacity for one month then some 300GB of data would be uploaded and similarly 300GB of data uploaded, assuming a symmetrical connection.
In a London data centre (or Manchester for that matter) internet transit costs £1 to £2 per Mbps per Month.
By the time that internet transit gets to Cumbria the price has shot up to £70 per Mbps per Month.
Even in North Yorkshire with the NYNet option the cost still exceed £20 per Mbps per month.
The challenge then for BDUK is to help to radically narrow that internet backhaul price gap between rural Cumbria and big cities by removing the reason for the difference.

The primary reason for the extra costs in rural areas is the cost of leasing a so-called tail circuit from BT (or others and mostly from BT as it has by far and away the most extensive existing fibre network across therural UK).

Therefore the simple solution is to capital fund these fat pipe internet backhaul feeds so that the ongoing cost of these connections reflects only the costs of operations and maintenance directly incurred i.e. remove the capital repayment element from the lease cost.

This step will serve to narrow the ongoing cost gap between rural Cumbria and urban areas and make a huge difference for sustainability.