Digital Britain – full throttle to mediocre broadband.
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:
Tagged in: United Kingdom
