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On the face of it, BT’s recently announced £1.5 billion fibre programme is welcome, but meagre. It would provide hybrid FttC/VDSL to only 40% of homes, leaving the remainder with ADSL2+. And there is no guaranteed funding as yet: work is unlikely to start on the project unless a number of criteria are set, mainly related to Ofcom providing a sympathetic regulatory regime involving a minimum return on investment, and to the co-operation of local councils which would be expected to part-fund deployments in their areas. Without these conditions in situ, BT may yet scrap its fibre plans or delay them indefinitely.
That BT’s (cautious) fibre plans have no national ambitions is striking, since there is a real risk that the UK could prolong its unequal broadband delivery into the era of NGNs. On the one hand, the UK has a much trumpeted broadband infrastructure with excellent competition and low prices for consumers. On the other, bandwidth is far more measly than in many comparable Nordic, north European and Asian markets.
A recent Broadband Quality Score report from Cisco which assessed broadband data rates in 42 countries showed how far behind the UK was in bandwidth league tables: average download speeds are adequate for web browsing, email and basic video downloading and streaming (the type of activity which currently occupies the majority of Internet time) but impractical for the increasingly bandwidth-rich interactive applications and high-quality video services available. There is, indeed, a correlation between a nation’s broadband quality (rather than availability) and its progress as a knowledge economy.
It is to future requirements that a national fibre strategy should be directed. The Broadband Stakeholders Group recently costed a national fibre network at between ₤5 and ₤29 billion, depending on whether the solution pursued is FttC/VDSL, FttH/GPON or FttH/PTP. There are two important considerations here: firstly, some essential expenditure is common to all three options, which reduces the difference between them. The cost per household for FttC would be about ₤210 against ₤1,020 for GPON and ₤1,200 for PTP, though deployment costs would be lower in dense urban areas (those which would be prioritised by private operators to secure a faster return on investment). While the government is keen to allow commercial interests to take the initiative in fibre roll-outs, it would have a crucial role in providing sympathetic legislation along the lines implemented by the French, particularly in reducing engineering costs by providing access to the existing infrastructure (ducts etc) of Virgin Media and the utility companies. In addition, for FttC / VDSL the final 16% of households in rural areas would cost £1.8 billion to connect, accounting for 35% of the total cost.
The second consideration is that outlays would be spread over a number of years and although returns for investors would be relatively modest the fibre network would secure a communications infrastructure for the long-term. What the UK needs is a long-term view, rather than its characteristic short-termism, and a willingness to spend for future generations. If the French can show how legislation lowers engineering costs, and the Swedes demonstrate workable partnerships between operators and owner-municipalities, the Dutch can also show that the 1Gb/s option is both feasible and desired.
For more info see :
2007 Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband in Europe - United Kingdom and Ireland
2007 Western European Telecoms Markets and Statistics
Paul Budde
