Tag Archive for 'broadband'

Its all about black and white

Published on September 17, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 12 Comments Tags: BD-UK, broadband, business models, central government, community strategy, digital britain, eu countries, Fibrecity, localism, NGA, politics, procurement exercise.

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 specific one being used named.

A bit of background. In 2009 the EU laid down some guidelines on where it was reasonable for a state to consider intervening in the broadband market; this introduced the concept of Black, White and Grey areas for classifying market failure in both NGA and basic broadband areas. A black area is generally one with a strong, competitive market; grey with a developing market; and White where the market has essentially failed. White does not necessarily mean there is no broadband, just no functioning market.

Basic Broadband

A Black area is one which has two competing fixed line infrastructures. So in the UK that typically means areas where both BT and Virgin offer services.
A Grey area is one where there is only a single physical infrastructure but it supports a wholesale marketplace. In the UK this covers any unbundled telephone exchange where there is no cable service, for example. Perhaps surprisingly this covers both Ofcom market 2 and 3 areas.
A White area is one where there is no choice of physical infrastructure and no wholesale marketplace. This in the UK means Ofcom Market 1 areas with no other infrastructure.

NGA Broadband

The definition for NGA is broadly the same:

An area with competing NGA broadband infrastructures would be an NGA Black area. In the UK that might mean an area with both Virgin DOCSIS3 and BT Infinity services, for example. Somewhere like Bournemouth with City Fibre and Virgin would also be Black.
An NGA Grey area is where there is only a single NGA provider with a wholesale market. This means an area with only BT Infinity would be classed as Grey – but an area with only Virgin would not as they don’t wholesale access services.
An NGA White area is one where there is currently is no NGA market available and no credible plans to deliver an NGA service within 3 years. This could include areas where Virgin is the only NGA operator and the footprint of many community projects like Alston Cybermoor as they don’t currently wholesale their services.

There are some major caveats in this!!

Only fibre-based fixed-line technologies are currently considered NGA technologies – wireless and satellite are currently considered “complimentary” and an area served by either is not considered as NGA Grey or Black. This means an operator using a Gigabit microwave technology could legitimately face state subsidised competition from a 40 Mbps FttC provider – FiWi is not currently protected! This may (should!) change but its a risk that needs to be born in mind today!

What’s an Area?

The EU guidelines recommend that an “area” isn’t defined as an exchange district as it may benefit the incumbent. So what is an area? At the moment this is something of a grey area, to stay with the theme. The UK government is providing local authorities with some latitude to choose between postcode areas and ONS “super output areas” (LSOA).

For a community thinking of building their own broadband solution, this loose definition may be critical. A postcode may only have 20-40 premises while a LSOA typically has about 400. A small community scheme may be protected from subsidised competition if the local authority decides to use postcodes as their defining area.

BUT if the LA uses super output areas as their measure, then any network which is much less than 400 premises could face a competitor legitimately subsidised by the BDUK framework.

Since BDUK are currently modelling communities as groups of around 100 premises, this seems rather contradictory.

BDUK Ambitions

The three years rule means that BDUK are able to focus their funding on the final third – the bit that BT haven’t formally announced. Their ambition appears to be to increase the NGA Grey and Black coverage from 66% to 90%. In the final 10% they want to ensure its at least Basic Broadband Grey (ie at least a single wholesale infrastructure).

NB: Big things you can’t ignore!

Anyone considering building a network, whatever their motives, needs to make sure both BDUK and the relevant local authority are completely aware, not just of the currently footprint but the credible expansion plans covering the next three years. Failing to be on their radar may mean state subsidised competition and a battle over illegal state aid few smaller operators will be able to afford.
A vague intention to offer wholesale services or simply making an offer to the market that is ignored is not good enough to be classed as “Grey” – you need to demonstrate a functioning wholesale market! Failing to demonstrate real wholesale agreements means your area remains “White” and could be legitimately subsidised. Working with a national franchise model like Broadway Partners and including an existing mediator that can deliver a proven wholesale market will certainly help both whether you’re at the planning or delivery stage!
And communities going it alone need to know what their local authority considers to be an “area” – if its an ONS LSOA, make sure your project covers one!

The more you think about this, the more implications you will stumble across. This a very messy, complex, and shifting space. Whoever you are, don’t do it alone!

Broadband doesn’t need high population density or PCs?

Published on April 19, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: broadband, idle thought, internet.

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!! He has a website from which you can download the tool he uses with such zeal, and you can create your own animated graphs on a whole range of global datasets, from poverty and health to broadband and the internet – yep, he has included just what I’ve been looking for!

I’ve not really had time to fully understand the mass of correlations the software supports yet, but I thought I’d share with you a couple of very quick snapshots.

Chart from the Gapminder tool showing the level of urbanisation and broadband take-up.

Chart from the Gapminder tool showing the level of pc onwership and broadband take-up.

The first was a chart plots the degree of urbanisation against broadband levels. I expected to see a nice clean line – the more urban the country, the higher the level of broadband. But it wasn’t quite as clean cut as that. Many of the countries that rank better than us in terms of broadband take-up are also less urban – in some cases significantly more rural.

So perhaps this is a case of logic over engineering – more rural areas demand broadband because they need it for shopping, healthcare, education and so on simply because traditional face time services are a long way away.

The second assumption was that you need a PC to drive up sufficient demand for broadband. Again, not quite true. A number of countries with lower PC ownership rates than the UK also have better broadband take-up. Is this a sign that other countries are finding more things to do with their broadband connection than just connect a PC, like tele-medicine? Or that perhaps we have been poor at marketing it? Do other countries offer a more compelling story, more than just ”here’s your bandwidth, now get on with it”.

I don’t have the answers to these, just a growing number of questions – and the more I play with the Gapminder tools, the more questions I’ll have.

Homework: read the ALA documents

Published on February 1, 2011 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: BD-UK, broadband, gpon, internet, net neutrality, network architecture, NGA.

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 broadband will work in the the UK.

The documents are not an easy read (this is, after all, a set of engineering standards designed to be implemented by engineers) but its impact should be understood by everyone who has an opinion on the future shape of broadband, the internet or net neutrality.

I attended some of the early meetings as an observer and because, like any opinionated techy, I wanted to help shape some of the early aspects. The Ethernet Working Group under Chris Gallon’s chairmanship is something of a technical dream team – they are the deeply technical architects and engineers from the major vendors and key network operators tasked with working out how their organisations can interoperate.

The work they have done is undoubtedly impressive – they have taken diverse standards from the Broadband Forum, the Metro Ethernet Forum and other standards bodies from around the world and carefully and creatively sewn them together into a single framework which unlocks the potential of next generation broadband across a wide range or network architectures and technologies.

Whether you opt for GPON, point to point ethernet or VDSL from a cabinet, ALA works and can hand over a connection in a seamless and universally consistent way to a service provider. And I see few reasons why it wouldn’t also work for many wireless technologies based around Ethernet and supporting VLAN’s.

Now this brilliant piece of work is published, we have a duty to understand what is possible and to start to consider what is desirable. It is no longer reasonable to opine on net neutrality or the future of the internet without properly appreciating the impact of this work.

If you are a community, commercial organisation or public body thinking of building a network under the BD-UK framework you will need to be open access – by law – and that means you need to understand ALA – no if, no buts.

So before you say another word on any of this, and you are of a technical bent, your homework is to read it!

If you aren’t technical, turn to your favourite geek and do them a favour – tell them to read it and explain what its all about.

The documents are published on the NICCs website:

Where’s the demand for “superfast” broadband?

Published on October 15, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 0 Comments Tags: broadband, gigabit speeds, imagination, intelligent supply, internet, national broadband network, NGA, terabit speeds.

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 find its own demand rather than Smith’s assertion that proven demand being the overriding principle for creating supply. How could we know we all wanted Skype before we had the infrastructure on which someone could develop it, or that Youtube would become the second biggest search engine after Google?

A common rebuttal is that this is dangerous “field of dreams”, “dot.com bubble” thinking but that would be to over simplifying things, although it must be acknowledged that the evidence of daft investments in the sector are rife and nowhere more than in the UK; even today, try saying “boo” to a venture capitalist if you don’t believe me.

Clearly not all things create demand which is why we need smart people thinking about this – smart innovators and not the kind of daft people who genuinely thought that the rules which govern the economics of the internet were fundamentally different from the economics of everything else – re-read “Blown to Bits” by Evans and Wurster if you need a refresher.

Smart people in the technology sector come in two flavours – technically smart and commercially smart – and its really important never to mix them up!!

Technically smart people innovate incrementally – eureka moments rarely happen in reality, with most of the breakthroughs coming from close collaborations and earlier research. Those collaborations are not just with their peers but also with commercial organisations that have the imagination to drive innovation but who need a market to address. IBM, for example, has announced a major new R&D facility in Australia and the Government’s National Broadband Network is cited is as a major influencing factor; IBM can see that the mere existence of the NBN will lead to new opportunities created by innovators free to imagine and with the tools to invest. The R&D money will seek out places with the imagination and the market. For a country which can’t make the case its likely to become a slow lingering death.

Commercially smart people on the other hand don’t just assume that supply will find its own demand unaided, they reach out to the market to understand how it might be most readily consumed. This is arguably the most critical factor which separates successful fibre projects from those which fail.

In the UK we still present superfast broadband as just that – a very quick pipe to the internet. This kind of message will appeal to the perhaps 10% of society, the early adopters, but the rest of the market is likely to wait until someone delivers a service which captures their imagination – the next Skype or Youtube. So when BT and Virgin say superfast broadband is a risky investment which has so far demonstrated low take-up levels, no-one should be surprised – they’ve not given anyone a reason to buy it.

Contrast it with some of the more successful European projects, where take-up can be north of 80%. A common factor among these is a commercial message that engages people and not just the early adopters – they give all kinds of people reasons to take a service. It could be healthcare, better or more local TV, gaming, education – any number of things which smart commercial people left to imagine ought to be able to conjure up. In fact one of the most successful projects I’ve visited makes a point of never mentioning bandwidth and rarely mentions the internet.

The UK is one of the most technically adept and gadget conscious markets in the world. So if someone tells you there is no demand for superfast broadband, look at them with pity and move on – they don’t have the imagination!

Oxonline

Published on September 30, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 2 Comments Tags: big society, broadband, community, digital britain, ed vaizey, News.

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 doesn’t run too well in anything other than Office 2010 so feeling I needed to do something I’ve converted the slide-deck a video. So here is the (so far silent) movie:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7in2JudXvj4

When I get a moment I’ll try to add a narrative and make it slightly less dull.

How successful would Finland’s broadband policy be here?

Published on September 11, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 3 Comments Tags: BD-UK, broadband, digital britain, fibre, government, manifesto, mapping, NGA, politics.

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 Scotland as well as a GIS-based estimate of how much it might cost to deliver it.

Heavily summarised, Finland’s policy says that there should be a fibre back-haul connection within 2km of any community; and they define a community as an area containing at least 70 people per square kilometre.

I was left wondering how effective this policy might be across England and Wales, as well as Scotland. I don’t have to hand the core network details that Prof. Fourman used to calculate the costs of delivering the policy nor the time just at the moment to build the shortest-distance spanning tree model he used, so I’ve restricted myself to simply looking at where Finland’s policy might reach that the market won’t.

The map (click on it to see it life-size) depicts in green the areas which the policy would deliver a fibre to, and the black is the extent of market-led next generation broadband according to DCLG’s 65% NGA model. A first glance says “so what – doesn’t seem very impressive”. However this is where maps have the power to overstate a problem. Using the 2001 census, there would be 11,946,819 (don’t you love computer precision!) English and Welsh people who remained without NGA broadband when 65% of the UK was already enjoying it. Applying the Finnish policy reduces this figure to just 275,451 – or in other words, increases the reach of NGA from 65% to 94% of the population.

The Finnish broadband policy would reach 94% of the English and Welsh population

Of course this is academic without the costs that Prof. Fourman generated, but it is a powerful example of how the village pump model that Rory Stewart MP is advocating. So how many of these green areas are close to a Primary School, Library or GP whose existing broadband connections could be upgraded and converted into a Village Pump?

Boosting the funnel

Published on September 10, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 3 Comments Tags: broadband, fibre, gigabit speeds, internet, network architecture, terabit speeds.

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, the internet is like a giant funnel; lots of stuff poured in the top at ever higher rates into narrower and narrower pipes the further we get from home.

We are now pouring more in the top than ever before, which means we need to make sure the neck of the funnel doesn’t become the problem.

One solution is to use a leaky bucket – the genuine name given to the techniques which lie behind many of the traffic shaping tools– but that doesn’t solve the problem, it merely optimises the experience for services squeezed by the neck of the funnel (not that its necessarily a bad thing either).

Increasing bandwidth over short distances is easy but extending over long distance is more problematic; we saw this in first generation broadband and laser light is no different. But, and this a big but, as we move towards next generation access networks, with the speeds already being deployed around Europe, the pressure on long haul inter-city and inter-national links will become immense. Delivering 100 Gbps is challenging over transatlantic distances and that’s only a hundred customers with gigabit broadband watching quad-hd 3d movies.

If we reach gigabit speeds in the home then rest assured the core will soon need terabit speeds. Delivering such bandwidth over 10’s of kilometres can be demonstrated but not over 100’s or 1,000′s – not in a single channel of usable bandwidth.

And here’s the problem. Fibre-optic cables are now so fine there isn’t much room for a beam of light to bounce off the wall of the fibre; so much so that over relatively short distances the effect is tiny and the signal emerges at the far end unscathed – but over long distances even small levels of bouncing around add up, corrupting the signal.

The developments announced this week are aimed at correcting the bouncing and corruption over distance, paving the way for terabit speeds across the ocean so our gigabit connected homes can still watch Hollywood/Bollywood films on our new 42” quad-hd 3d tv’s.

The whole space of photonics – the boundary where electronics meets light – is one which will move centre stage as we try to manage the funnel. Delivering high speeds to people’s homes is technically easy but ensuring there is the intelligence and scale in the rest of the network to match will frame the problem. Visionaries, like the people at Southampton University and others like InTune Networks and their work on switching tuneable lasers, may not make good dinner party talk but they will be the people that ensure the future Internet keeps up with the uses imagination puts it to.

Rating the big society

Published on August 17, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: big society, broadband, central government, fibre, NGA, rateable values.

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 see what the impact the VOA rules will have.

In this hypothetical community lives around 2,500 people in 1,000 homes with 20 shops and businesses along the main street, mostly cafés and family businesses.

Lets say that an NGA project for the area has a single point of presence, and for simplicity that all the shops on the main street average 1km from the PoP and that each take a broadband service over a single fibre. This project is then connected to a neighbouring scheme 25km away using a direct fibre connection the scheme owns. So in total they have 45km (20 x 1km businesses plus 25km backhaul) of rateable fibre and 1,000 domestic customers.

All the tables of what rate what length and capacity are taxed at is here but this is a quick summary for this village:

The domestic access network element is rated at £20 per home connected, so we have an immediate £20,000 to consider.
Then we have 20km of business access with a single fibre lit, so this adds £6,600
And the 25km of backhaul adds a further £16,750 because they lit 4 fibres

A total rateable value of £43,350, which is rounded down to probably £43,250 and a multiplier is applied to calculate the payable rates. I understand the current multiplier is 0.417, so the rates payable by this community is £18,035.25 – or almost £18 per customer per year.

To add further complexity to this, I’ve assumed this project was an isolated community wanting to help themselves but if they had accepted an offer from a much bigger commercial company who had more than 1,000km of fibre, they might find the rates bill drop to a little over £13 per subscriber because scale, for the Valuations Office, matters.

There are any number of lessons to be learnt from this. Firstly that the additional rates for migrating a corner café shop from first generation broadband to a fibre-based connection costs as much as they may be currently paying for their broadband connection which seems to counter the ambition of the Government to unlock the potential of small businesses.

But equally curious is the disadvantage a self-help Big Society community is being asked to endure over a larger corporation through the business rates system. In my hypothetical village, a Big Society community would be asked to pay almost 40% more in business rates than Major Plc (setting aside the special treatment of BT which further exacerbates the problem).

It seems the VOA have created a very unique landscape for the UK to overcome. The UK has neither the appetite nor the money to fund a Da Wo top-down national fibre network, but the VOA rules means we also have a tax system which penalises grass-roots developments as well.

So who is encouraged to build if macro and micro approaches are being discouraged?

A model being championed by Rory Stewart MP for his Cumbrian constituency, part of which falls within the Big Society pilot area, is the idea of a village pump for broadband – a high-speed backhaul connection delivered to the heart of the community. If this is delivered by an large organisation then they may also benefit from lower business rates than the community itself would.

This then leaves the community to pick up the rates on the access network element for which there is less discrimination. As I coved in a previous article, if the community opt for a PON network rather than point-to-point then they can argue that the businesses can’t be isolated from the domestic customers, which limits their rates liability to “just” £20 per subscriber, business of domestic.

This seems such a complex, arbitrary model which serves to further contort the market rather than open and improve it. Somehow I don’t believe that Rory’s Village Pump concept was at the heart of the civil servant’s thinking when they “clarified” the rating system – its one of the many unforeseen outcomes.

VOA views on network architecture

Published on August 16, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 3 Comments Tags: broadband, central government, fibre, gpon, network architecture, NGA, politics, rateable values.

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, there was one aspect I didn’t think had been explored yet. It’s worth understanding the VOA’s position on network architecture and the impact they may have.

On the access network piece they have two means of calculating rateable values:

For domestic users there is flat rate of £20 per home connected
For businesses there is a table which relates to the distance, amount of fibre in the scheme and the number of fibres lit

However, the VOA has this to say in their worked examples:

The following scenarios are intended to provide clarity to the approach the VOA would adopt when applying the approach set out above. The scenarios cover FTTC, FTTH-GPON and FTTH-P2P, and have the following assumptions underlying them.

The end users in each case are a mix of residential and business customers; the identity of the end users as either residential or business users will not necessarily be available to the organisation liable for the rates on the asset (particularly if they are providing wholesale access to other service providers).

The implications of this are that if business customers can’t readily be singled out then they will be rated as domestic customers at £20 per connected premise. This really only applies to PON networks (not just GPON as the VOA asserts) where customers share a single splitter, while in an Ethernet overlaying a point-to-point network each customer will always be identifiable.

I calculated that the additional rateable value for connecting a corner café in a small town network might be in the order of £330 per year depending on all sorts of variables but as an order of magnitude it will do. This would be unavoidable if the network used a P2P Ethernet but if the café happened to share a PON splitter with some domestic customers then the rateable value might be reduced to £20 per year.

If I were designing a network today this would certainly influence my choice of technology, and if I were a member of the Metro Ethernet Forum or a manufacturer of fibre I’d be rather concerned that I’d been singled out in this way.

** UPDATE ** But this has wider implications than just prejudicing the technology choices of network owners. For it to be reasonable to claim that its not possible to differentiate between business and domestic customers, the PON splitters would really need to be buried in the network and not in the point of presence; the deeper the splitters are embedded the more reasonable the claim.

However this reduces the openness of the networks and the degree of infrastructure competition that can be developed. So adding to the clamour of the MEF, fibre manufacturers and network owners should be Ofcom – the VOA’s guidance as it stands impacts competition and choice.

Perhaps rather than a little more clarity, a simpler, fairer mechanism is called for!

It would be so much nicer if the civil servants behind this work sat back and took a long, deep look at what they are actually trying to achieve and designed a framework which did that simply and directly, rather than adding more caveats and “clarification” to an already over-complicated morass.

Ambition is the new agenda

Published on July 18, 2010 in Adrian's tech blog. 1 Comment Tags: aggregation, BD-UK, broadband, central government, community, digital britain, ed vaizey, government, internet, jeremy hunt, JON, manifesto, News, NGA, parliament, politics, spelman.

Last Thursday I attended the Government’s Industry Day where they laid out their key policy framework and work programme for broadband and the internet. If you hung around just long enough to hear Jeremy Hunt, Ed Vaizey and Caroline Spelman speak, and with only one ear on what was being said while you rushed to submit your copy you might be forgiven for thinking this was another platform where the new government blames the old for a delay in delivering on a promise – BUT you’d be VERY wrong.

Before the election two phrases kept cropping up – “We’re in this together” and “Big Society”. For me, Thursday’s event was possibly the first time I’d seen a concrete example of what that meant in real terms. What was announced wasn’t a policy which handed large sums of money to a semi-state organisation to proscribe how better broadband would be delivered from on high. Instead we heard from Ministers explaining what their role was in defining and delivering the future, what we could reasonably expect from central Government, and what needed to come from others.

We heard how the Government will remove barriers to investment and create the structures necessary to support local communities in defining their own broadband futures, and how industry would be encouraged to support that process, enabling a smart division of skills that could solve all but the most intractable of broadband problems.

And we heard from a Minister with a vision of 50 Mbps symmetrical services reaching most people by the end of this parliament delivered by the combined efforts of Government, industry and communities. I suspect that sent a few shivers through Whitehall but knowing the people involved I’m sure they are universally excited by the challenge.

Starting immediately is a month long consultation seeking paper solutions to three paper broadband problems. These will be used to shape the Government’s support programmes, ensuring both commercial and community organisations receive the right kind of support in the right manner. At the same time, the English regions and the devolved assemblies are each being asked to construct a long-list of areas they want to benefit from next generation broadband. From this, Broadband Delivery UK (BD-UK) will announce the location of three real market testing projects in September and begin a tendering process to find the right mix of commercial and community players to make them a reality. From these projects they aim to learn about the impact of state aid, forms of broadband registration and demand stimulation, and infrastructure sharing open access models.

While this is going on, BD-UK will be negotiating with the EU towards a national state aid agreement which for the first time since dial-up modems were in short trousers will provide clear guidance to local authorities on what they can and can’t do. State Aid legislation has been a bigger block to UK investment in broadband than almost any other, with state sponsored projects crippled by fear of challenge or paralysed by years of rulings before they can begin work. The first roadblock gone – and with it gone, a new process will be in place to unlock the public networks which already reach many of our most remote communities.

Secondly work will push ahead on infrastructure sharing including the opening up of BT’s ducts as well as other assets like the sewers and culverts. This is a knotty problem and not a panacea but an important element in making the UK an easier place to invest in. Second roadblock going.

With all this work hopefully complete – the lessons from the market testing projects learnt, infrastructure hopefully opened up, and state aid put to bed – the Government will announce the main programme of work next year to support local delivery of super-fast broadband, supported by what they termed “mid-level aggregation” to make it easier for the service providers to link to homes and businesses. This time next year we will be well prepared for the main challenge ahead.

Did I hear all the answers on Thursday?		No
Does that worry me?		Quite the opposite – I’m relieved!
Am I excited?		Absolutely!

For the first time in a long while, ambition is back on the agenda. Whether we actually achieve at least 50Mbps symmetrically to every corner of the UK doesn’t matter nearly so much as the way it will change the shape and aspirations of an industry, and the people and businesses that it serves. The journey matters as much as the arriving, and we are on our way.