You are browsing the Blog for fibre.
Gigabit? Who needs it?
Recently two things got me thinking a little: 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
...read more...
Horses for Courses – picking the right tools for the fibre job!
This blog started life on my Posterous page which I use for quick thoughts but the impacts have been troubling me so I decided to move it to my main page and add a little to it. It started when I spotted this tweet from FiberNews, run by the excellent Marc Duchesne (If you don’t
...read more...
Open is the best (only) policy
If I’m honest I’m a little tired of the whole open network debate – largely because I don’t think there is very much to debate. 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
...read more...
What’s actually going on?
It still surprises me that after 18 months there seems to be confusion in the twittersphere about what is actually happening in terms of broadband deployment and the goal of the government’s policy. 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
...read more...
An observation on British broadband #1
Some key announcements have been made in the last couple of weeks or so and its worth considering what they may mean for broadband in the UK – I don’t know why it took me so long but the conclusion is quite startling! Firstly, we are seeing a host of new models and investment announcements
...read more...
Time well spent looking down the drain
I’ve just had one of those days you feel good about. So often I tend to get involved in broadband projects at the very beginning and my work is done before a single spade breaks earth – in some cases its been as long as three or four years between my involvement and anybody actually receiving a
...read more...
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
...read more...
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,
...read more...
Rating success or land-grabs?
I’ve one final piece to get off my chest about the VOA’s “clarification” on business rates applied to fibre networks, and its about the upside-down nature of the rules and how the new framework exacerbates an already difficult situation. The old rules taxed fibre owners for homes passed regardless of whether anyone bought a service.
...read more...
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
...read more...
