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A market view of the fibre evolution
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
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Its all about black and white
Anyone who has been close to any public sector involvement in broadband is likely to have come across references to Black, White and Grey areas but I get the impression that the meaning is often not well understood; this is perhaps not surprising because there are in fact two models and rarely in my experience is the
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Broadband doesn’t need high population density or PCs?
I just re-watched the brilliant BBC programme “The Joy of Stats”, where the infectious Hans Rosling’s encourages you to explore the world of statistics. I’ve been hunting for a long time in search of a better way to present the mass of data on broadband and was left somewhat envious of the way Hans presents his world facts. Good news!!
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Homework: read the ALA documents
I received an email this week from the NICC’s Ethernet Working Group with links to the finalised Active Line Access (ALA) document. This is very exciting news for all sorts of reasons. ALA is the industry agreed model designed specifically for the next generation broadband world, and at any number of levels it fundamentally changes the way
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Where’s the demand for “superfast” broadband?
As we start to debate what “superfast” might mean in a broadband context, too often people are returning to the bigger “why” questions: Why do we need to invest at all? where’s the demand? The technology sector is an example of where Saye’s economic principles tend to trump Adam Smith; where intelligent supply tend’s to
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Oxonline
Recently there has been a run of really good broadband events around the country, and last weekend was the turn of Oxfordshire. It’s been such a manic week that I haven’t had time to write much about the event but I’ve had several requests for my presentation from the event. The wonders of Powerpoint mean the slides
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How successful would Finland’s broadband policy be here?
At the NextGen Road-show event in Edinburgh this week, Professor Michael Fourman gave a fascinating talk on the special challenges for delivering broadband in Scotland. At the heart of his work were some maps which very effectively demonstrated the impact the Finnish Government’s broadband policy might have on some of the more remote areas of
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Boosting the funnel
It was reported this week that a group of British scientists at Southampton University have developed a technique for keeping the light in fibre-optic cables nice and tidy and in sync. I thought I’d write a short blog on it because the importance of the discovery seems have been missed by some commentators. For my purposes,
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Rating the big society
I’ve already written about the impact the clarification by the VOA has on technical decisions and network architecture, but there is a wider impact and one which suggests the civil servants at the VOA haven’t really understood the new Government’s Big Society agenda. By way of an example I’ve attempted to work through a typical rural project and
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VOA views on network architecture
The Valuation Office’s clarification on rating fibre networks seems to have aroused much debate – I decided not to publish my own piece on the general tone of the clarification as much has been said before, and none better than this: as clarification goes, this does seem to be a unique piece of work. However,
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