Digital Britain – full throttle to mediocre broadband.
Last year the UK’s government’s Next Generation Access report concluded that there was no case for the government to intervene in further developing NGA in Britain. This decision gave little consideration to the vast increase in bandwidth expected from consumer use of IP-delivered content in coming years. It placed an undue emphasis on the potential of mobile broadband to complement poor fixed-line bandwidth, particularly in remote areas but also in a number of badly provisioned urban zones.
Little has changed in the mindset of the government’s advisors during the intervening months. The network remains in a sorry state, with low average download speeds compared to benchmark European countries.
The Digital Britain interim report (the final report is due in June 2009) has been presented as a blueprint for the UK’s information economy for the next few decades, but the provisions are shamefully meagre. One of the central tenets is to deliver at least 2Mb/s broadband to each household and business by 2012. There can be no guarantee that this will be met (the emotional tug for the public is to link this date in with the London Olympics), but even if all households are signed off in time the measure will appear measly compared to what much of Europe will have achieved by then, let alone already has.
Download speeds of up to 2Mb/s are barely adequate in 2009, and already pale compared to existing 50Mb/s services offered by Virgin Media and up to 120Mb/s offered by Liberty Global’s cable operators in several European markets. By 2012 this ‘aspirational’ data rate will be effectively akin to today’s dial-up service.
Otherwise, the report concerns itself with measures such as setting up a Rights Agency (funded by Internet users) to gather data on breaches of copyright, on traffic management by ISPs and on digital radio – these and similar concerns will be thrashed out again during further meetings between ISPs and content owners before the final report is due.
In true bureaucratic fashion, the report lists recommendations on subjects which have been debated for several years, and postures many more questions than it solves. Among these is how the ‘super-fast’ broadband network will be funded? Given that a national fibre network has been costed at between ?5 billion and ?29 billion, depending on whether the solution pursued is FttC/VDSL, FttH/GPON or FttH/PTP, there remain some essential logistics beyond the promise of universal broadband. The government remains keen to allow commercial interests to take the initiative in fibre roll-outs, but is likely (given the continuing economic turmoil and pressure to invest public funds on infrastructure worthwhile projects) to foot some of the bill, as has been seen increasingly by governments in other markets.
Currently, the incumbent, BT, is only obliged to provide every household has a phone line, and although every exchange is broadband-enabled a full 10% of households can not receive adequate broadband. The report hopes for future investment from all industry players, including the mobile network operators which will be called on to fill the gaps in remote areas. Yet there is no deal as yet with these mobile players, each of which want a more relaxed regime of the rules governing what they can do with their existing spectrum allocations: a planned auction of the 2.6GHz spectrum has been put on hold since mid-2008 following legal challenges by O2 and T-Mobile, which both claimed that without knowing whether re-farming of the 900MHz spectrum band would be allowed they could not calculate how much of the 2.6GHz and 2010MHz expansion band they would need. No further progress in this case is expected until March this year.
The final report in a few months may deliver greater clarity on some of the minor points, but for most consumers the depressing reality is that the government is determined to provide a mediocre solution when a more daring and future-looking plan is called for.
For more information, see the separate reports:
February 12th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Paul
You’re on target, but it’s even worse. Buried in the details are significant rate increases for BT and the right to erct tollbooths for content. Painful.
db
February 15th, 2009 at 3:01 am
[...] blog posted a critical assessment of Britain’s aspiration to have complete broadband coverage by 2012, suggesting that the [...]
February 16th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Dave,
Indeed there are a number of preconditions with the Digital Britain report which makes one cautious whether the final outcome in 2012 will actually achieve the stated aim of universal broadband in the first place, however limited its sights.
In the last months of 2008 the government was accused by the Tory opposition of delivering nothing more than proposals: the Digital Britain report was trumpeted by the government as the final answer to these accusations, yet it provides numerous suggestions for further committees and assessments. Broadband-for-all remains dependent on costs and indeed on how it can be delivered at all. This in turn has been presented as an opportunity to rope in the other players besides BT to share the cost burden, including the public itself: as with the current USO (by which BT provides a phone service and narrowband Internet) the public can be expected to foot part of the bill if BT or other providers (eg KCOM) considers the cost prohibitive.
During the next three years there will be opportunities to pass on costs to consumers or to push a number of households in current no-connect areas into the ‘too hard’ category, while maintaining the fiction of univeral availability.
Furthermore, while this availability looks poor even on paper, it looks worse when contention ratios are taken into account. Sharing capacity on a line which can have up to 50 other connections can considerably dent throughput.
Regards,
Henry Lancaster,
Senior Analyst, Europe
BuddeComm
Henry Lancaster