A workshop and seminar from CBN and The Open University, in association with the Centre for Creative Collaboration, University of London

Tuesday 25 June 2013

12.30 Registration and lunch, finish 17.30 followed by drinks and networking

The Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street London WC1X 9NG

Local authorities and other public sector bodies are looking to invest in broadband infrastructure – sometimes with funding from the government through BDUK or the EU, and sometimes using their own resources or in partnership with the private sector.

Key aims are to transform public services and to stimulate demand for fast broadband as a way to build the digital economy. But what are the key transformations that need to occur, and how can broadband projects ensure they come about? How can investment in infrastructure be connected to innovation and take up of new applications and services?

In this seminar CBN and The Open University will demonstrate their tried and tested ‘Imagine-IBZL’ methodology for tackling these difficult issues, showing how multiple stakeholders can be brought into an effective innovation and delivery process and helping participants make the first steps.

A must-attend event for anyone working on public-sector-led digital and infrastructure projects.

Timetable

The basis of this is the same scale of intervention used in the previous post, ranging from light touch loan guarantees through to a state utility model. It begins with the assumption that the market will  invest up to a natural limit; this limit may vary from company to company but will be based on some measure of digital isolation.

A key complexity for public bodies is how to determine the market’s limit for investment. Broadband markets, as distinct from traditional telecommunications markets, increasingly contain a broader range of companies and capabilities; some of these are emergent trends while some are established niche operators. This trend creates a complexity and often a degree of risk that administrations considering a broadband intervention need to assess.

Its clear from even a cursory review of international interventions that there is no universal view of this, with some administrations favouring a more traditional telecommunications play, leveraging a small number of larger, established operators, where other administrations are looking to include a wider spectrum of alternative, new and niche operators. Ultimately this will depend on national culture, the appetite for risk within the administration, and the level of stability within the niche and emerging sectors.

Its also important to note that digital isolation will include a wider basket of characteristics than simply rurality or population sparsity. While these are clearly aspects of anyone’s measure of digital isolation  there is a need to include aspects such as digital exclusion for social reasons which may be linked to urban areas as much as rural; if these traits lead to low levels of take-up then they represent a barrier to market-led investment.

The chart above plots the different types of intervention against some measure of digital isolation. It assumes that an intervention at lower levels of digital isolation is rarely warranted purely on the basis of digital isolation – that’s not to say an administration couldn’t make a case based on other strategic criteria, and there are several economies around the world that have done just that.

However, limiting the criteria to just digital isolation and applying the thinking in the Public or Private article produces a zone where public interventions are likely to strike a balance. If the medicine is too strong at lower levels of digital isolation then the intervention risks distorting the market too much (A on the chart), while there is a risk that a light touch approach in more isolated geographies risks being ineffective.

This balanced “green zone” is generally the sweet spot for interventions in many market economies, increasing the strength of intervention at higher levels of digital isolation. This approach implies that in order to optimise the intervention and to balance the efficacy with the market distorting effects a number of different types of intervention may be necessary, but this will necessarily be something driven by local circumstances – there may be for example, insufficient variety and capacity to develop multiple paths to ubiquitous broadband infrastructure.

Each market will therefore have a unique balance between the green, amber and red zones. So while this model can’t prescribe a solution without local modelling, it does help to frame the shape of interventions – overlaying  local market capacity, investment opportunities and so forth with this model will start to shape the options for intervention.

Most parts of the modern world take a position that private enterprise should prosper where it makes sense, and that Government support of some kind should be focussed where its most needed. I haven’t met any fundamentalists recently so no-one questioned this and the focus of debate was primarily on when should the state intervene and what form should the intervention take.

Personally I like graphs – especially ones with axes that have no clearly identifiable scales – so this is my graph of where and how might a state fund industry.

On the vertical axis is the expectation of “commercial return” likely to be measured in terms if Internal Rate of Return (IRR), etc. On the horizontal is the expectation of “economic return” measured in terms of Gross Value Add (GVA) or Economic Rate of Return (ERR).

This graph assumes that generally where there is a sustainable business case, private enterprise should be left to find its own investment, and that public funds are generally focussed on areas where there is the strongest economic return (lets park the role of social return for another time).

In this model, proposals without either economic or commercial return are without merit, but it suggests that different forms of public investment may be needed for different degrees of commercial return in order to minimise the market distortion.

So where there is a marginal case for a commercial investor alone but its considered of high economic value then a light touch approach which bolsters confidence in the investment markets may be the best approach – something like a loan guarantee scheme perhaps.

As the commercial case weakens, then the state may need to consider direct investments in the form of loans or shares. Where the commercial case reaches a point where a sustainable business model can deliver zero return then the public investment in practice becomes a grant.

In the extreme, where there is essentially no private investment case and where no amount of confidence building or underwriting will make a sustainable case the only remaining option may be a state-owned venture – most typically strategic utilities. Some western economies also make a case for state-owned enterprises where the economic imperative is extreme and its viable delivery so strategic that its felt any risk of possible failure is too high.

This is in essence, at a very high-level, my interpretation of how the EU rules on state intervention tend to work, and how other market economies further afield tend to approach the role of public investment. What this approach doesn’t do is consider the social return on investment which is something for another day!

It was an interesting process – and not without frustration. The Posterous plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites doesn’t seem to work with current versions of WordPress,  the native import process only works for WordPress.com websites, and the Posterous backup process is ponderous – it took hours and hours to produce a relatively small xml file.

I have to say, it could have been made a lot easier!!

In the end I gave up and manually copied articles across. The naturally gets yo thinking about what you’ve written before – Do you still think the same thoughts? Have things moved one?

In the end I decided that revisionist history of my thinking was not right so in just about every case I just copied the article over unaltered while preserving the date of publication – If I changed my mind then its all in context and my vacillation will be laid bare.

It can be argued that the telecommunications market is undergoing what may be the single largest transformations in its history as it migrates away from copper-based services towards fibre-based solutions.

The debate surrounding the shift often focusses on the immediately practical points of the technology choices and the mechanics of who pays for it and how. In this post I try to consider the movements in the market as a whole that are under-way and how these might best be supported.

I’ve taken as a starting point a model borrowed from work done by Evans and Wurster in their excellent book, “Blown to Bits”, looking into some of the reasons the dot.com bubble burst and some of the survival strategies that helped others prosper. While I’m not suggesting we’re approaching a similarly apocalyptic moment, their view of how organisations align to form a market is pertinent.

They suggest that all organisations within properly functioning markets have to consider a trade-off between what they call “reach” and “richness” – market reach contrasted against the ability to customise and tailor a service. All businesses sit somewhere along that line with perhaps McDonald’s at one end with a global reach but a low ability to offer you anything other than what’s on their globally fixed menu, and the Roux family restaurants at the other end who find it impossible to become a global restaurant empire but they can offer precisely what their customers want.

Applying this model to today’s telecoms market is revealing – the curve is disjointed, with commodity but high-reach broadband offerings at one end, and high-value corporate products at the other with few if any services completing the curve.

At the consumer end exists ADSL products where differentiation is limited to little more than brand and contention, while at the other end are wholesale Ethernet products attached to MPLS clouds and the like – and there is almost nothing in between.

It can be reasonably argued that this is a natural result of the necessary scale of a utility infrastructure needing to consider the best solutions for the widest audience and can’t reasonably consider a market that best services each customer – this can be done but at a price and only to a select sub-market.

In many respects, therefore, we should not consider telecommunications as a single market but a group of sub-markets which are quite distinct and typically with their own specialist providers, and to understand the whole market stresses, therefore, it’s important to understand how each of these sub-markets are reacting to the move towards fibre-based services.

An important aside we’ll return to was the emergence of first generation community-led broadband schemes. These were typically wireless-based services built and operated by communities in areas where early ADSL services were unlikely to appear from the main commercial operators in the short to medium term. The motivation of these projects was typically not to become life-long network operators, although there are exceptions to this, but to prove demand where it was doubted and to ensure they weren’t disadvantaged in the medium term as neighbouring communities started to exploit ADSL services.

These schemes delivered low reach but typically developed much greater “richness” – their engagement within their communities and the support work in helping neighbours get on-line ensured higher levels of take-up, proving the demand that others doubted. But, I’d argue, few of these initiatives ever really formed part of what we typically consider the telecommunications market.

That in no way diminishes the value and importance of these schemes, quite the reverse. These schemes found ways to deliver services to places where it was thought impossible and delivered demand where it was thought not to exist, and we live with they legacy of these pioneers still today.

In summary, a key impact of first generation community-led schemes was that they provided a strong impulse for change in the traditional telecommunications market but they did this without themselves becoming a part of it.

The first moves in the migration to next generation fibre-based services are now well under-way but it’s clear that different markets have taken quite markedly different paths ranging from the highly centralised Australian National Broadband Plan to some European countries highly decentralised metro-network programmes.

It is perhaps natural to want to consider which of these approaches is “right” and which are “wrong” but rarely can migrations as significant as this be distilled down to a simple right and wrong. In helping to understand the shifts that are under-way  and therefore how these different strategies may help or potentially hinder the migration, the reach-richness model provides some interesting insights.

The emergence of VDSL services is perhaps the simplest to plot on the curve – it is a perfectly natural evolution from first generation ADSL services by increasing the richness of the offerings through significant speed increases but with some reduction in market reach – while all premises are connected to an exchange not all cabinets are suitably located and not all premises are connected cabinets reducing the reach of VDSL.

It is the development of more decentralised approaches which require a little more consideration before judging whether they are an evolution of the first generation community-led schemes or if they are a shift in the main telecommunications market – and there will be a mix where some schemes clearly want to promote their credentials as part of a different market more associated with the first generation communities. However, the impact this group is likely to have may turn out to be similar to the first generation – they provide a powerful impulse for operations on the curve, encouraging developments more widely than might otherwise happen but they are less likely to evolve mechanisms that deliver scale themselves.

In contrast, it is those initiatives that are attempting to align themselves with the core market that are more likely to have a wider impact on the overall shift in the market as this is where the models can develop scale and be more readily replicated. Here, there appears to be a natural evolution of approach that began in campus networks and has grown in concept into the Metro-nets we see across Europe and the US, and are emerging in the UK. It could be argued that this is perhaps a reason these initiatives have tended to favour Ethernet, the natural choice of campus networks; as  much a cultural as technical or commercial decision, just as operators at the other end of the curve tend to favour VDSL and PON.

The natural scale and the focus on a “rich” solution tailored to both the customer and the geography allows operators at this end of the curve to find viable solutions in harder to reach niches than operators arriving from the other end of the curve. An operator in this space is unlikely to compete on a national scale but international examples can be found where their scale is significant or where the market sub-sector combined is developing significant scale. For example, almost a quarter of the US fibre market is held by smaller alternative providers where the average operator has fewer than 10,000 subscribers.

A simplistic conclusion, therefore, might be that the Metro-Ethernet Forum and their supporters are preparing for a face off over the middle ground with the Broadband Forum and their members but the work of the UK’s NICC has demonstrated that this is far from the truth, even if it makes less exciting headlines. The NICC’s work on Active Line Access (ALA) has seamlessly codified the co-existence of Ethernet, VDSL and PON networks within a single market, allowing the increasing reach of the evolved campus companies while simultaneously supporting increased richness in the mass-market offerings.

And these shifts in market behaviours are not one-sided. In developing their pioneering service, OnsNet in The Netherlands developed what they call their 7-pillars model which encapsulates the different characteristics they consider a successful fibre-based network will need to embody. While their approach and intent is very clearly from the campus end of the curve, and has served them and their followers very well, it would also be fair to say that some of their teaching has been taken on by Reggefiber, a company that is industrialising the Metronet approach in The Netherlands and perhaps more aligned with the Reach end of the curve.

While I’m sure Kees Rovers, the founder of OnsNet, would say they are not applying their thinking in the round, it would be fair to say that Reggefiber would not be able make a success of what is essentially a traditional utility model typified by homogeneity without borrowing some of the OnsNet philosophy around engagement and communications.

It is now possible to see how the bifurcated curve might edge towards becoming a full market spectrum. Certainly the movement from both directions along the curve is undeniable, and there are growing signs that there is learning from both movements’ approaches, so the questions that remain focus on whether the market will join in the middle or at least complete enough of the curve to ensure solutions are sufficiently widely available to support a future economy.

BDUK will speak for itself and this is not the place for making announcements on their behalf but from a personal observation the Rural Community Broadband Fund has become a major provider of support for community broadband schemes. The RCBF is now arguably the biggest investor in community-led broadband in this country at the moment with some exciting projects about to emerge from the fund.

The last year has also seen independent community projects like B4RN move from being an idea into a scheme with pipes in the ground – and receiving much publicity along the way.

More traditionally commercially minded organisations are also beginning to find ways to invest with companies like Gigaclear opening projects in Rutland and Oxfordshire.

The recent arrival of experienced European’s  like Rala from Sweden can only accelerate this trend, and the American’s are here in the form of Calix. The UK would seem to be increasingly a place to test experience earned abroad.

On the back of this there are growing signs that investors are seeing rural broadband as an attractive place to invest. There have been any number of community share offers launched by social enterprises seeking to raise funds for broadband and there is the announcement of a new specialist investment fund targeting rural broadband from Broadway Partners.

Major carriers are also waking up to the potential of rural broadband with providers like Cable & Wireless tailoring support for smaller rural schemes, and Vodafone doing much to promote their Oxera report into network co-investment again backed by experience gained abroad. From left-field Network Rail have also expressed their intention to deliver backhaul along their branch-lines which has the potential to revolutionise rural broadband.

And it would be fair to say that BT is making increasing progress in tandem with communities, with fibre-on-demand likely to increase this in the coming year.

Is it all smiles and roses?

Of course not but when I look back to previous years where progress in the most rural areas has at times been all but non-existent it has been a remarkable year.

Much of the combative noise has broadly been replaced by a more co-operative hum of activity, and where the barking remains its largely out of frustration that it can’t happen quicker, not that it isn’t happening.

Delivering broadband in the rural most areas of the UK is still not for the feint hearted no matter what the business model or motivation but good, solid progress is being made. There may not be vast numbers of connections live yet but rest assured they are certainly on their way.

While there are still many challenges to face, it looks to be a vintage year in the offing.

• One of my main PC’s needed a little maintenance
• I visited the launch of Gigaclear’s Appleton network in Oxfordshire

My main Windows PC developed a memory fault and I needed to get a little support from Yoyotech, the excellent people who made it for me. When I got it back up and running, I benchmarked the machine using the Windows Experience Index and saw it was hovering between 7.8 and 7.9 – the index only goes to 7.9.

I’m yet to find a task this PC, when it’s feeling fit and well, can’t do in its sleep.

And this is one of two Yoyotech machines I have, so when I link databases between them and run queries on millions of records and transfer piles of data between them, they do it at gigabit speed in moments.

My network addressed storage box joins in, delivering data only a tad slower than the solid state drives in my PCs.

So to get this out of the way, I guess that does make me a geek.

But the other event was the launch of Gigaclear’s gigabit network in the Oxfordshire village of Appleton. They’re delivering a gigabit-based broadband service to homes and businesses in the village, and people were encouraged to come along to the village hall to try it out – a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) day.

I wasn’t going to bring my PC’s (far too big and cumbersome) so settled on my smart phone since it was already in my pocket. It struggled to get much above about 20Mbps throughput on the free 802.11n hotspot – way below the headline speed of the access point.

But that’s the point. I have a gigabit switch at home with a small number of unusually fast gigabit enabled devices capable of filling anyone’s broadband network. But the rest of the devices we have – phones, PS3s, tablets, laptops, media boxes, etc. – can’t.

Many of them are wireless, so even at 802.11n speeds of 300 Mbps they won’t come near to a gigabit connection. Especially when you take into account that wireless manufacturers still add the up and down together and forget to mention the overhead, so a 300 Mbps 802.11n network is probably closer to a 100 Mbps wired network.

So why might anyone want a gigabit connection – what is the killer app?

I think the point is that no one mainstream application today needs a superfast broadband connection much above, say, 40 Mbps (pick your own number but its likely to be less than 100 Mbps) but a family stuffed full of internet capable devices might.

For me the killer app is “The Family” and all their collected uses.

A typical scenario in our house:

• My son doing homework online with Youtube and media rich resources or gaming
• My daughter accessing different media for her homework or watching an HD movie on Netflix
• My wife catching up with TV on iPlayer in HD since its built into the TV box or looking at other media services online
• Me trying to hold a skype call or download large datasets for work

All at the same time!

But before you can properly use your killer apps full potential, you’ll need to sort out the biggest bottleneck emerging today – your home network. Home wiring and wireless networks typically fall a long way short of a true super-fast broadband connection’s capability.

In the C&W survey, they found “Easy access to markets, customers or clients” remains the most important factor, followed by “Availability of quality staff” and “Quality of telecommunications“.

London tops their table, consistently and across the board – including in telecoms:

This subset of the table showing the scores specifically for telecommunications, broadly mirrors the overall table – London tops the table followed by Paris and Frankfurt but with a narrowing margin as each year passes.

While London’s access to markets is considered to be improving year-on-year, widening the gap with competitor cities, the availability of quality of staff and the quality of telecommunications is considered to be declining in international terms. While each of London’s closest rivals also saw reduced levels of quality staff, Paris and Frankfurt were considered to have increasingly competitive telecommunications offerings.

At this rate of decline, it will take some time before London is knocked off the top spot but it highlights the importance of telecommunications to the localtion of businesses.

Bringing this to the fore is Stockholm – 13th overall but they manage 4th in the telecommunications leagues table. Stockholm’s overall attractiveness to business is heavily distorted by a single factors – broadband.

Thanks for Benoit Felton for pointing this research out.

MAPPING MOVEMENT USING TWEETS

Twitter provides a goldmine for anyone interested in people, geography and maps. I’ve played with the Twitter API before and have a geo-coded database table of well over a million records I play with from time to time to see what I can learn about how the on-line world relates to the real world

I’ve a small python script I leave running from time to time, days at a time, on my (free) Amazon cloud instance that captures every geo-tagged tweet from the UK and Ireland and logs it to a gigantically enormous CSV file. A few minutes after I’ve stopped the script the whole lot is nicely stored in a database, the co-ordinates with pinpoint accuracy calculated and ready for use.

In the past I’ve looked at when and where people tweet – is there a peak hour or is twitter a 24 hour, 7-day a week culture, and what kind of people tweet and from where?

By the way, Westminster journalists & politicians are the most active – kind of obvious I guess but the vast gap between them and any other Twitter demographic group is striking!

Underdark’s blog will add to my arsenal – when she publishes the promised code samples I’ll soon be able to run a script over my data and not only plot a pin in a map to say where the hotspots at an instance are but I’ll be able track how people got to the hotspot:

• Did they commute to Westminster or did they live locally?
• What time did they set out?
• Did they head straight home or were they on the way to somewhere else?
• Who else followed them around?
• Who did they meet?

What I do – and Underdark – is anonymised demography, geography and mapping. Neither of us have any interest in exactly who is tweeting only in the patterns and what they tell us. No individual is identified and their whereabouts plotted and tracked in a way that exposes them or invades any individual’s privacy.

I wonder how many avid, compulsive Twitter users realise that anyone – absolutely anyone – can capture absolutely every tiny detail of every tweet, store it and use it to track every little movement they make during the day as they chat and gossip with their friends, colleagues, ….

At a time when we are all rightly repulsed by phone hacking, we are all openly shining a bright and public light on our own lives in a way that anyone can pick up without breaking any law and without covert technology.

Personally I’m very conscious that what I say on Twitter is public, and I’m sure many (I hope all) reading this blog do to. In fact until I started to think about Underdark’s article I assumed everyone did but do they?

Does everyone really appreciate the extent of the information they’re exposing on-line?

During our chat we got to talking about ICT at school. Last week his class had to create an advert in MS Publisher; database lessons extend to setting up a card index in MS Access; there is no computer architecture, networking, programming,……

No-one has ever explained that a computer has a hard disk, or the purpose of RAM or an operating system, or what the internet actually is.

He went in to tell me that he learns more about technology and the Internet from his family and from sessions like this with me than he ever learnt in seven years at school.

He went on to say why this worried him. His conclusion was that if schools didn’t start to teach the kind of ICT that might be useful for more than an office administrator then the industry would become a professional clique like law or medicine, where the only way to get into the profession was through supportive parents who already worked in the industry; that technology would become hereditary.

If a 12 year old can see this, why can’t a vast profession of pedagogues?

It started when I spotted this tweet from FiberNews, run by the excellent Marc Duchesne (If you don’t follow @mduchesn, then why not!):

“MikroTik RouterOS – Hardware suggestions for FTTH ISP bit.ly/IVK6v9“

Seeing it raised some big questions in my mind, and ones which I think are largely a UK specific issue and not one which may be of particular relevance to other countries beginning to fibre-up.

FttH is long-lasting national strategic infrastructure. At some point in the future there will be a copper switch-off and the fibre infrastructure left behind will become default telecommunications network in each country.

This isn’t a Mystic Meg prediction – I can’t say how long it will take but Regulators in some European countries are already starting to consider the conditions under which copper networks might be switched off.

When it does happen the fibre networks being built today become natural monopolies and will have the sole responsibility for delivering critical services and for supporting the market that relies on competition from wholesale operators through service providers to content organisations. All this will rest on the decisions being made today by the pioneering fibre operators.

Many countries around the world have active community-led broadband markets but there is a subtle difference in the UK. In my work with BDUK, I suggested three broad models for delivering community solutions:

• Partnership – where there is co-investment in the assets but the network is designed, built and operated by specialists
• Concession – where the community own all of the assets but a concession is offered to design, build and operate the network
• DIY – where the community own all the assets but also design, build and operate the network themselves

The UK, like many markets can find good examples of the first two, and this is the core focus of many international fibre markets, but I suspect the UK is alone in seeing the emergence of the third group.

In the context that any resulting fibre network will become the national strategic infrastructure, any undertaking by a community carries with it not inconsiderable responsibility and for any community considering a DIY approach this responsibility rests entirely on the shoulders of the community.

I should be clear here: There is absolutely nothing wrong with a community adopting such an approach and for a few this is something their communities will be willing and able to take-on, and I for one wouldn’t want to stop them – so long as they fully understand the responsibility they are taking on.

However, it was the tweet at the top of this blog that brought into sharp focus for me this sense of a community having a full understanding of these issues and what practical steps they need to take to assure themselves and their communities.

MikroTik is excellent kit. I’ve used it myself to build devices with features from pretty much all the Cisco catalogue from simple routers to deep packet inspection, intelligent traffic shaping and distributed load balancing devices.

MikroTik and similar kit formed the basis of the wireless network I built some years ago to deliver first generation broadband to homes and businesses in rural Oxfordshire. It allowed me to build features into that network that simply couldn’t have been cost-effective any other way, and in the same circumstances I’d do it exactly the same way again.

But I wouldn’t build a network the same way that will at some point in the future will become the network ultimately responsible for guaranteeing blue-light telephone calls or providing critical health-care services, or for sustaining the local leg of what has been identified as the largest and most vibrant on-line economy in the world.

There is a fundamental difference between deep-fibre based NGA networks and the previous generation of overlay broadband networks:

• Overlay networks largely have the luxury of choosing what traffic they carry and how;
• Deep fibre networks will become the national infrastructure and with that comes the same responsibility that today pretty much only the incumbent operators have to shoulder.

When you build a FttH network you are saying that you are prepared to take-over that responsibility at some point.

For that reason I would want to make sure the equipment I used to build such a network was designed to carry the burden, and that would rule out consumer grade network equipment and equipment that works brilliantly in overlay networks but isn’t designed for such a critical role.

I could still find a 100 and one uses for MikroTik hardware in my network but I don’t think I would sleep well at night using it for mission-critical network elements. The reality is that being able to meet these requirements necessitates carrier grade equipment with carrier grade processes and support systems. Its all about horses for courses – picking the right tools for the job.

Lessons from the US and Europe show that doesn’t necessarily mean gold-plated pricing or vast scale but it does require a level of understanding that few communities will easily find locally.

And it is this understanding that has typically led European and US communities to favour partnership and concession models – and deterred them from being more hands on.

I don’t want to send out the message that community-led broadband can’t work – it clearly can and I wholeheartedly support it. All I ask is that if your community is considering a DIY approach you weigh up the full implications alongside the benefits you have identified.

If you have any doubts, compare the outcomes and the risks with other models – with developing a partnership with a specialist or from offering a concession to run your network.

As a rule of thumb, many incumbents tend to prefer a premium position for their NGA services as a means of managing their transition from their existing first generation services, while new entrant NGA providers were more varied in their approaches. But one thing was clear from Benoit’s findings – successful NGA schemes need to be very clear about which approach to adopt; sitting on the fence or having an ambiguous market strategy is a mistake.

I decided to write this up now for two linked reasons reasons. At the moment many Local Authorities across the UK are starting to contemplate the reality of delivering their Local Broadband Plans which will include demand stimulation and community engagement. Secondly, there are a growing number local schemes either starting out or in advanced stages of development at the moment.

For both groups understanding the importance of Benoit’s findings is a first important stage.

• For local authorities contemplating demand stimulation and galvanising their communities to maximum effect, while understanding the market position of their likely delivery partners will provide a critical insight into what its reasonable for their chosen partner to do, and where their own demand programme will need to focus;
• Community-based schemes generally would be suicidal to adopt an exclusive premium position within their towns and villages, so starting to consider how to optimise their market footprint will be critical to their success.

So what is it that defines a premium market position and separates it from an acquisitive one?

A common error that people in the technology sector make is to forget that there are other people than technophiles – that market’s contain more than just innovators. Every once in a while its worth pulling out a “Marketing 101″ crib sheet and  reminding ourselves of Everett Rogers ”Diffusion of Innovations” model.

A premium market position is one that squarely attracts the “Innovators” and “Early Adopters” – here bandwidth sells. Simple messages that liberally mention fibre and big headline speeds are all that really matter:

“All you need to know is you get a Gig”

This is the message that reaches the people who happily queued all night for the iPad 3 when they already had iPad’s 1 & 2 – technology as a religion!

This approach is likely to reach the dizzy heights of perhaps 20% take-up – something an established company managing the migration from existing, lower-cost services would be happy with as a base-camp position but is likely to be unsustainable for anyone else.

Everyone else needs a reason to buy NGA. Most people aren’t moved by gigabits or have a view on the glass v copper debate. For these people its all about services – what you can do with it.

For Rogers’ “Early Majority”, that’s easy – these are typically adept users of technology and avid consumers of media. Content providers like Netflix and Love Films, and the greater responsiveness of the PlayStation Network are already making a good start with an embarrassment of riches coming down the line from the cloud. Reaching these customers is also not complex – many in the Early Majority will be on Facebook and Twitter so developing a dialogue is not difficult.

Persuading the Early Adopters and the Early Majority will help you reach break-even on a typical fibre project but it won’t get you into profit. For that you need to reach out to the “Late Majority”. This is a group of society that are less comfortable with technology and will often be quite utilitarian in their uses – on-line banking, booking a holiday, Tesco on-line orders, and so on. This group may already view today’s average broadband speeds as excessive – here not only doesn’t bandwidth sell, it may actually be a turn off.

However, a key constituents of the Late Majority will typically be older people and people on lower incomes; the kinds of groups that are more likely to be users of public services. The transformation of public services is the single most important way to attracting the Late Majority to technology in general and especially NGA networks.

Healthcare and independent living solutions that enable people to stay in their rural homes longer, and education programmes aiming to raise the ambitions of children and help adults back into work will be key to encouraging the Late Majority to go on-line. The flexibility and power of the experience that can be delivered by NGA networks makes this, to enlightened innovators, a far better starting point for developing novel services than first generation broadband – but get it wrong and the damage will be much longer lasting than if you get your media play slightly wrong for the Early Majority.

So Local Authorities looking to develop effective demand stimulation programmes could do much worse than look to the way they deliver their own services first – reach out to the Late Majority yourself and push your delivery partners to reach the Innovators and Early Majority, something they should naturally do well. Not only will you deliver much better take-up levels and secure economic outcomes, you may also save money!

And for community-led schemes. The term may have gone out of fashion already but this is Big Society territory.

Develop a fast broadband service, mould it into a triple-play bundle but then focus on local services - things that actually make a difference to people. Sell your triple play – market your local services.

And then one day it finally becomes obvious, your hand makes contact with your forehead and you can move on. This is one of those moments.

Convex Hull – the GIS version of stretching a rubber band over pins in a map is easy – most GIS tools have a menu item to do that somewhere.

That’s great if you don’t have any inlets and concave edges to your outline – if you do you need a Concave Hull.

Concave Hulls – a GIS version of vacuum wrapping a set of points plotted on a map.

Sounds easy. Easy to do with a pencil and paper – its just dot-to-dot with the outer-most points – but not so obvious using mapping software, or at least for me anyway.

BUT I’ve finally figured it out (with the help of some very good web resources).

I use a combination of Qgis and PostGIS – brilliant open-source GIS tools. Assuming you have these and can install pgRouting as well then Concave Hulls are very easy indeed!

Sorry – big assumption but they are all available for Windows, Macs and Linux and fairly easy to install. I use Linux, so installing the UntuGIS repository will give all these, and on Windows try OSGeo4W for an installer for it all.

So lets assume you have a geo-database of points and you want to create a polygon that tightly follows the outer-most points. The pgRouting additions include a “points_as_polygons” database function which does exactly this.

So within your database you might type :

SELECT id, the_geom FROM points_as_polygon($$ SELECT gid AS id, ST_X(the_geom) AS x, ST_Y(the_geom) AS y FROM os_addressbase WHERE postcode = $x$OX28 5FE$x$ $$)

This gives you a rather meaningless string of numbers, in this case a coded outline for the addresses with a single postcode but entering this using Fast SQL in QGis will turn the meaningless code into a polygon on your map:

I’m pleased!

All this reminded me of something I heard a while back at last years Broadcast Evolution Summit in Cannes – a very good event but notable for the complete absence of any internet “broadcast” companies and a large number of traditional TV executive who were showing very real signs that they didn’t really get what was about to happen to them.

At the Summit, it was pointed out that it took something like half-a-century before a car had stopped looking like horse-drawn carriage. Similarly, early TV’s often looked like some odd amalgam of sitting room furniture and a radiogram; it then took another generation to pass before colour was added; and another until HD was added.

But now TV has joined the internet; a medium that evolves in months a years rather than years and decades, and its notable that its the Internet pioneers that are making the early ground, not TV stalwarts.

I’ll give you an example. At the Summit there was lots of talk about linear and non-linear TV:

• Linear is the way we watch broadcast TV, where there is a constant stream flowing past us and we have a simple binary choice to watch it or not.
• Non-linear is recorded TV where we dip into a pool of content and choose what to watch and the order in which we watch it; this is what happens when we record stuff on our PVR, visit YouTube, drop by Mubi, install Boxee, go to Witney.TV or use the iPlayer catch-up services.

This list is long and that’s because just about all of the innovation is being made by non-linear companies and the distinction they are making with linear models is rapidly eroding.

At the Summit I reminded the audience that at a gigabit it was possible to download an HD movie in a lot less than 30-seconds. Puzzlement! Why do I care?

That’s less time than it takes to broadcast an ad – while you are watching the ad, your next HD programme will be streamed to your box; the choice of programming could be pre-booked by you or it could be carefully selected by a cloud service that collects meta-data from your previous watching patterns, taking in Last.FM’s Love/Hate buttons, and your social media connections, linking you to your communities of interest.

Today the concept of “Spotify for HD TV” is well within grasp – Love Film has launched the first steps towards it, and with Amazon’s cloud infrastructure behind it it is only a matter of time (months rather than years).

Is this linear or non-linear? And who really cares? One thing is for certain,  TV executives shouldn’t!

Traditional media companies have highly skilled staff and are able to create top draw content within islands of trust backed by the very best creative labs; even if their brands may have to do battle with major global players like Apple and Google for platform space, their content should remain king. But this, in the medium term, will only remain a valuable asset if the linear mindset is put to bed.

I understand Google has set YouTube a strategic goal to increase viewing time from minutes to hours per day. This is why net neutrality is so important to Google – unless the transmission medium is reliable they won’t be able to secure the rights to the very best content. If you were Disney would you sign away your content to a platform that regularly pixelates the most valuable asset attached to your brand?

I’ve written before about net neutrality and how ALA is about to deliver the tools that for innovative internet aware companies will remove the chance of pixelated content over pervasive and very fast networks so I won’t repeat myself here except to say that I’ve had far, far more interesting conversations about content delivery from internet companies who are beginning to get it, and far, far more puzzled or dismissive faces from traditional broadcast companies who don’t.

How long will it be before Google or Amazon try to secure premiership football rights? And who would bet against them?

For the time being at least it seems TV companies are playing catch-up. The speed of change is far, far quicker than anything they have experienced before, and they are being measured against companies who are comfortable working at that speed.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about the global challenges being posed by the US proposal for a domestic “Internet kill switch“; if the US Government were to switch off the US portions of the Internet it would not just deny UK citizens access to common services but may also kill entire portions of the UK’s internet access because of the global nature of internet peering.

There is no simple answer to this. Of course national Governments must act in their own self-interests but when it comes to the Internet the impact is seldom felt by local citizens alone. Internet Governance, thus far, has been largely successful in developing a fairly egalitarian, global phenomenon outside of national governance but we are entering a new world where national security, health and prosperity depend on the future running of the Internet – this makes it politically very important, not least to key knowledge economies like the UK.

US citizens have typically been more aware of this than many other nations – the importance of net-neutrality is a deeply emotional, heart-felt thing in the US but has so far been largely missed by UK citizens and is totally ignored in Ireland where the lack of transparency is actively marketed by the largest operator.

The reaction to the Internet blackout in response to the US SOPA proposals was interesting. It seemed to mark the awakening of debate beyond the US. I didn’t hear much from politicians outside of the US but the interest from commentators went beyond simply bemoaning that they couldn’t look things up on Wikipedia. When Jonathan Agnew from BBC’s Test Match Special comments about the importance of the internet and the problems that SOPA may introduce on Twitter, then it must have become mainstream.

My own position is that while copyright of course needs to be protected, the ramifications of any loosely drafted legislation can have far wider impacts, and the implementation of internet legislation specifically will always have implications far beyond national boundaries. Any Government considering a move like this today has a responsibility to world citizens and not just the self-interests of one sector of their local economy.

Today requires a generation of Internet-savvy politicians who can find new world solutions to old world problems like copyright.

The article is littered with comparisons between the broadband co-ops and “commercial providers” as though, somehow, co-ops aren’t commercial - they don’t trade and make a profit? Really? So how did they last so long?

The UK has a similar issue – co-ops are often deemed “not for profit”. Equally nonsensical – they are as free to make a profit as the most carnivorous plc; they must as there are no magical powers that mean co-ops don’t need profits to reinvest and be sustainable.

The only thing that separates a meat-eating “commercial provider” and a fluffy “not-for-profit” co-op is what they choose to do with the profits they do and must make.

• A publicly quoted company, after making an allocation for reinvestment, may pay their owners a return in the form of a dividend to shareholders
• A co-operative company, after making an allocation for reinvestment, may pay their owners a return in the form of interest to shareholders and a dividend to their members

There is no reason why a public or private limited company, a partnership or a co-operative shouldn’t make a sustainable business out of the same situation – the choice of legal incorporation is really a matter for the owners and investors, and doesn’t necessitate a particular trading philosophy.

There are, however, very good reasons why locally owned businesses of any form of legal incorporation may be able to reach geographies that traditional large-scale operators would struggle to supply:

• They know their customers personally
• They can closely tailor a solution to their locale’s very specific needs & opportunities

This can offset the benefits of scale enjoyed by major providers, especially at the margins of a market; broadband, in this regard, is no different to local shops v supermarkets or niche manufacturers v mass market companies.

So why co-ops? In my book, it’s a personal choice but I can understand why locally owned and run organisations, often also funded locally, frequently choose to become co-ops – in many ways it’s the natural choice when “we’re all in it together”.

I have worked with co-operative network operators and “commercial” operators over many years, and I’ve not detected any marked difference in their relative success rates.

However, there have been very real differences in organisations’ understanding of their local markets and the local opportunities leading to very critical differences in their success rates; the ones that survive and outlive their initial investment have been commercial, for-profit organisations, whatever form of incorporation they initially plumped for.

Higher frequencies attenuate quicker than lower frequencies, so the drums passes through walls when the violin frequencies are more quickly absorbed.

ADSL uses the frequencies we can’t hear because we want to continue to use the phone line to speak to each other. The lower frequencies needed to carry phone calls travel a long way down a copper wire, but the much higher frequencies used to carry a broadband signal will attenuate more quickly just like the  soprano living next door.

As we demand ever higher bandwidth, we need to use more and higher frequencies which will fade away even more quickly, which is why the broadband equipment in VDSL, like BT’s Infinity service, needs to be closer to our homes.

To help improve the speed and reliability of superfast broadband “vectoring” is being introduced to VDSL services; this reduces “crosstalk”.

So in the same vein, if you have two noisy neighbours, one doing DIY and another listening to some music loudly, vectoring will allow you to filter out the DIY noise so you can clearly pick out the tune from the neighbour with the better choice of music.

In any event with such high frequencies being used for broadband over a phone line, make sure you don’t let the dog answer the phone.

If I were building a next generation platform today I would certainly ensure that ALA was a central part of my strategy, and I would begin to consider how I could use that to bring my investment closer to people and relevant to their lives.

One step worth considering and developing is that of a default VLAN; a limited community service connection that’s delivered to everyone who pays a line rental. Such a basic service shouldn’t cost anything to deliver and should not be allowed to interfere with your wholesale platforms but is something that could mean your service becomes relevant to a wider group of customer, not least those that don’t traditionally buy things like Internet packages.

Services delivered using this are likely to be on-net only (no transit), free to air public services. For example, the local authority, in return for buying a port in each point of presence, would be able to deliver public services to each and every home – regardless of whether the homes had bought a suitable Internet connection, taking the concept of a “community hub” to whole different level.

If, what and how you deliver this will be for you to decide but its the kind of thing that ALA and multi-dimensional networks make possible.

So a bold statement:

I think that Active Line Access (ALA) will become one of the most important features of public networks in the years to come – but it will take a little time for that to become apparent. I also know that so far very few people have understood this.

When I talk to people who build public networks they typically see ALA as the necessary replacement to PPP/L2TP; that its the technical remedy that allows them to hand-off connections to ISPs in an NGA world. They are of course right in a very practical, narrow sense but what the NICC did in codifying a long list of technical standards was much, much more than that.

When I talk to people who build campus networks their immediate response is what’s all the fuss about; ALA is a codified collection of standards that large corporates have been using for many years. Again broadly true but they have forgotten what their lives were like before they had these tools.

A Ghost of Christmas Past

Travelling back 15 years to the world of large corporates, a network managers lot was very difficult. They typically had the biggest budget in the IT department with the biggest sign-off but they also found it the hardest to provide direct empirical evidence that any incremental increase in their budget would deliver a greater incremental impact on the business; granular return on investment calculations were impossible.

Around this time I started to talk about the proximity to business, and it went like this:

• The applications people had a direct relationship to the business so anything they did had a direct and immediate bearing on the business; incremental change could be measured and valued.
• The core software people, like database administrators, were closely coupled to the applications people so although they were one step removed from the business and their systems may be shared, they were were close enough to the business they could measure their impact.
• The server teams were further removed and incremental investment is beginning to become more challenging because their world is now two layers removed and increasingly shared but by working closely with the applications and core software people they could typically prove enough incremental value to justify additional investment.
• The network teams were by definition universally shared and with no direct connection to parts of the business, only to the business as a whole; at this time, budget meetings in times of major shifts in the business were a pretty unpleasant affair and something most network managers dreaded (or at least the ones focussed on the business did)

With Y2K looming, I started to focus on how I could bridge the void and improve my proximity to the business. It was also at this time that what I then called 3D networks were beginning to be possible. Traditional 2D networks were a trade-off between distance and speed but 3D networks had a policy axis using a combination of VLANs and qualities of service; combining these meant I now had a granular control over the network and could therefore finely adapt the network in response to changing business needs – it was now possible to improve the network’s proximity to the business and therefore provide a direct and measurable impact. Budget meetings could now be constructive and less confrontational.

It took time for the ideas of 3D networking to take hold, and my name for it never stuck, but today any private network manager of any merit should be able to have a direct dialogue with the business.

When the NICC created ALA, they codified the tools that private network managers use; they put in place the mechanisms to improve the proximity of public networks to people and businesses – and the impact of that will, in time, be far more profound.

A Ghost of Christmas Future

It often takes a single event to focus minds and create the conditions for a shift of this kind:

• For private network managers it was Y2K, when vast sums were spent renovating application platforms and they needed to justify their budgets.
• For public networks it will be the shift to NGA network we’re just beginning.

So when I talk about Service Providers I’m not being lazy and omitting “Internet” because I assume they’ re synonymous;  its because I think ISPs are in reality a general-purpose subset of Service Providers – that once “providers of service” become aware of what the NICC has done the service provider market will become a whole lot richer and more exciting.

I had hoped the NHS might have been the pioneer in this space – the confluence of PSNs and the emergence of NGA is an opportunity that should be grabbed with both hands – but I suspect it will take a major commercial company to make the first move.

Who might the early movers be? The major cloud companies and content delivery networks (CDNs) are the obvious choices, and who better than Google (with YouTube) and Amazon Web Services (with Love Films).

Imagine this:

Today Google offer a best endeavours YouTube service, over the top of other people’s transit networks; it works okay if your goal is to support three minutes of viewing per day but isn’t good enough for three hours per day. This is at the root of Google’s concerns over Net-Neutrality.

In response, Google launch a Premium YouTube service for a few pounds month but instead of routing the service via an IP-based BGP interface onto your ISP’s network, its routed via an ALA VLAN hand-over point to your network operator. Quality is assured so now you can watch three-hours a day of broadcast quality media, and Google can secure the rights to premium content as the risk of pixelation has been removed and the rights holders can feel confident their brand wont be damaged.

Love Films backed by an ALA-based “Networks as a Service” offering from Amazon Web Services is at least as well placed to be the pioneer, completely demolishing the current rigid assumption that viewing is either linear (broadcast) or non-linear (on-demand); their new streaming package that learns your viewing habits is the first baby step.

Today, this minute, this is a dream – a perfectly feasible dream – but as companies like Love Films evolve their services and they explore, prod and push the capabilities and limitations of the underlying networks then I’m as confident as I can be that it will become a reality. When (not if) an organisation like Amazon Web Services gets their heads around the capabilities of ALA the world will change and imaginations will be unleashed.

Today we have a world of Over the Top (OTT) services – prepare for a world that combines OTT with RTS (round the side) services – and prepare for a future that blows your mind.

If you build your networks without ALA in mind then you are about to condemn your platform to obsolescence and your customers to boredom!

Start developing your networks with a proximity to your customers in mind and you will never look back!

It seems very odd to me that people who are happy to argue that their own networks should be closed and vertically integrated are often well informed about the European open access models and the US net neutrality debates – that these great debates are basic human right but that they somehow don’t apply to their networks but should to everyone else’s.

Until recently it was certainly true that all but the very largest networks had little choice but to deliver their own internet services – but that was a market imperfection rather than a point of principle or commercial choice. That market flaw is easing – far from fixed but progress is being made – and it is no longer a necessity to restrict service choice.

I’ll accept that the very largest service providers are still unlikely to bite your arm off for anything less than a few tens of thousands of customers but there is a very large world of choice between no service providers and offering each and every service provider. Many of the smaller ISPs are happy to engage in local broadband projects, especially if they themselves are local – and what’s more they may be better attuned to providing a bespoke service to your new customers than many of the very biggest providers.

So why should NGA networks be open?

• People like choice – it may not be the number 1 factor for everyone but it is very important and will be in the top thee for most people. With take-up being the top success factor, its simply not worth putting an impediment in your way.
• Encouraging service competition is likely to generate more exciting, innovative services. As the capabilities of NGA networks, and more especially ALA,  become understood by the market service innovation will be more exciting than anything we’ve seen so far  but it will miss any networks not geared to delivering variety.
• If you need support from public funds then you have no choice; EU and UK law insists on open access wholesale networks. Shooting the messenger doesn’t change the law, so frankly if you have a hole in your investment case open up and you might find public funds are available to help.
• Without wholesale services, you’re footprint is deemed “NGA White” and the State reserves the right to intervene with public funds. It may not be likely and you may have a case to challenge publicly subsidised competition but by the time the law rules you will probably be no more – its not a fight worth fighting.
• And finally I fully expect Ofcom to rule within the life of your investment that fibre networks are a natural monopoly and may either force you to offer a wholesale service or impose challenging regulations on you.

Or to summarise – there are no good reasons to have a closed network and a good many to be open – its not a fight worth defending.

I’ve also started work on what I hope will become a book (“Cloud Consciousness” is the working title) looking at the shape of the cloud and how its future is closely entwined with the development of next generation networks – not exactly Christmas list stuff but I hope it will be more interesting than it sounds. About a third is written so far but it needs time to think – this is a massively disruptive area and the opportunities will be immense.

Radio silence will soon be broken – hopefully!

I keep hearing this dubious use of language but exclusively from wireless operators and its at best very misleading.

If they are right, then I need to tell Intel to stop referring to my gigabit Ethernet card in my PC as 1000baseT and to start calling it 2000baseT.

And while they’re at it, Be There have wrongly sold me my 9 Mbps ADSL2 connection – its really 10 Mbps as I also get 1 Mbps back up to the Internet.

Assuming they are not wrong, and they aren’t, then I respectfully ask wireless ISP’s to stop doing it.

While its true techologies such as 802.11a refer to total bandwidth, that allows professional operators to shape their packages to suit their customers – define a suitable up and down package that works for their customers.

Duplex in a telecoms context simply means a system able to communicate in both directions at the same time – it does not give you the liberty to add the two directions together and pretend its a useful number for your customers to know.

As we rambled, my friend said that he thought Google+ would outlive Twitter – it was more rounded and open. That’s a big statement but it got us thinking about the relationship various social media platforms have with their developer communities.

Twitter – a huge success with a very open API that enables developers to do a vast amount with very little effort but so far the focus seems to have been on creating a huge scrap yard full of also-ran replacements to TweetDeck.

Yet the combination of hashtags and friends could so easily have been shaped into “circles” with the right interface but no-one seems to have done it as part of their Twitter interface.

The extraordinary mine of free information available available about each and every tweet – where it came from, the device they used, and a whole lot more – is a goldmine to any organisation yet so far much of the intelligence to mine it is documented in O’Reilly books and hasn’t really made it to the user-ready cloud yet.

When Intel launch a new chip they make sure their key developers have every opportunity to fully understand not just what’s new but the reasoning behind why they added it – its a critical part of Moore’s Law feedback loop.

But it feels like Twitter have created a fantastic resource in their open API’s but have failed to ignite the imaginations of the developer community about its sheer power – what else can be done other than search for hashtags?

Google and Facebook on the other hand seem to have been better at engaging developers to help shape their environment in the directions they want – they have become rich markets for any number of apps and extensions.

I have a hunch that unless Twitter can engage the developer community as others are my friend my well be proved right in the the long run – not tomorrow or any day soon but I can see his point.

If only I was a developer . . . .

There have been conversations which seem to jump from a position that fibre to every home is the only real NGA solution to suggesting they are being short-changed by some mythical NGA satellite with nothing in between.

This is far from a simple binary mechanism – anyone who suggests “Fibre good, everything else bad” is at best badly misinformed. The debate is far too important to be stifled by this kind of mantra – it has to move on.

One of the great shifts in thinking within the industry has been to consider multiple solutions – gone are the days when ADSL won simply because it was the best solution to reach the widest audience. Now the best technology from a basket of possible solutions is becoming the norm.

So this is my attempt to make it all a little clearer – hopefully.

There are essentially two different government broadband policies:

1. Basic broadband – To ensure everyone has access to at least 2 Mbps
2. NGA broadband  - To make the UK the best superfast broadband market in Europe

Both policies are currently working towards 2015, and both are being delivered by BDUK. But, while the delivery of NGA broadband may have some impact on the basic broadband policy, they are essentially two different things – basic broadband is not NGA and vice versa! This is a simple undeniable fact.

The grid shows how these two different measures – NGA and basic broadband – are likely to play out in the UK. The purple area is where the commercial developments will focus, and the red is where the Government’s policy will have its key impact – the black boarder around the NGA White/Basic White is where the rural community broadband fund will focus.

NGA Broadband

The definitions of NGA and superfast broadband are many and varied but essentially the Government’s goal is to deliver fibre to the cabinet to 90% of the population as a base reference offer – that is not the same as actually delivering FttC to 90%, only that this is the base upon which other solutions will be measured.

It means that a company wanting to bid into the framework will need to offer at least FttC but will be able to deliver FttP or anything else they can successfully argue delivers at least as much as FttC.

The EU currently views NGA as a fibre-based fixed-line solution and specifically excludes satellite and wireless solutions; it is highly likely that some microwave technologies will be included in future definitions if they deliver specific characteristics but unlicensed and light licensed solutions like WiFi are unlikely to be ever considered as NGA even if they deliver high speeds.

Any suggestion that satellite or BT’s BET are NGA is simply wrong, and I’ve never heard anyone in either BT or the satellite industry claim otherwise! Just ignore anyone who suggests they are, they simply aren’t credible.

The main NGA contenders today are FttC/VDSL and FttP in both point-2-point/Ethernet or PON variants.

The two bar charts above attempt to show the impact of the Government’s policy on NGA broadband. Today there are commercial pledges to deliver a competitive physical infrastructure to at least 50% of the country, predominantly in the areas where Virgin Media are updating their cable network and BT is delivering their Infinity service.

In addition, BT has pledged to reach two-thirds of the country with an open-access wholesale service, making a further 17% Grey in the EU’s language. This leaves the “final third” where traditional commercial approaches begin to fail.

The Government’s aim is to extend the Grey area from 17% of the population to 40%, with only 10% of the population unlikely to see NGA services in the medium term.

Why only Grey? I find it difficult to see a case where the Government would invest in a competing NGA platform where one already exists but it is at least a theoretical possibility if the existing NGA service doesn’t deliver a whole service and is vertically integrated. As I’ve written before, if you run an NGA network and you don’t offer wholesale competition then you are carrying a risk that it is at least legal for the state to subsidise a competitor even if its poor value for public funds and probably unlikely to happen.

The focus of the £20m rural community broadband fund is on this final 10%, where communities are prepared to become more actively involved in a more ambitious plan.

Basic Broadband

Today its possible to argue that anything above 512 kbps might be classed as broadband; the Government is redefining that as 2 Mbps and that it should be as near universal as practicable.

The bar charts above show how today there are in fact two degrees of White basic broadband – there are those that currently receive a services above 2 Mbps but have no choice of provider, and those below 2 Mbps regardless of how much competition there may be at the telephone exchange. The Government’s policy is to remove the top White section, where services are less than 2 Mbps.

Some of this will be solved by the NGA plans – there are locations where the cabinet, as well as the premises, is a long way from the exchange. Evidence is already beginning to appear where BT is deploying Infinity in Hertfordshire with some homes now in an NGA Grey area when they were previously in a notspot – it is also the focus of organisations like Rutland Telecom.

Where the NGA policy won’t solve the notspot problem, the Government will intervene to ensure all premises are reasonably able to receive at least 2 Mbps.

In communities where the 2 Mbps offer doesn’t meet their ambition, the £20m rural community broadband fund may be able to help turn a basic broadband offer into a viable NGA plan where the community will exists.

@cyberdoyle (Chris Conder) has been running a Speed Wave on SpeedTest.net, capturing UK broadband speeds and the leader board makes very interesting reading.

At the time of writing around 10% of the reported speeds qualify as NGA broadband (above 25 Mbps); these were made up of a mixture of ISP customers, public sector networks, and data-centres.

Looking solely at the ISP’s, the list was headed by two ISP’s offering services on City Fibre Holding’s Bournemouth fibre network, peaking at a whopping 569 Mbps – or 100 times more than Akemai’s average for the UK.

Elsewhere on the SpeedtestNext system was a new Rutland Telecom customer on their new Gigaclear network, reporting 62 Mbps. While it may not be in the same league as Bournemouth, it should be remembered that Rutland don’t do cities – they do deeply rural, difficult locations. This customer in Hambleton has gone from living in a notspot where half-a-meg was typical to one of the best places in the UK to use broadband.

The impact of BT and Virgin’s roll-out is also being felt with both Infinity and cable broadband making up the NGA ISP list. (And Openreach vans have been parked outside MY cabinet this week installing fibre so now its personal)

Its early days but there are good signs that soon the UK will be reversing its direction of travel on Akemai’s state of the internet report.