Over the last few months, the Community Broadband Network (NGA) has organised a series of six regional events sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent and designed to examine how local communities can develop schemes to provide next generation access (NGA). The events have been held in Gateshead, Nottingham, Bristol, Birmingham, Basingstoke and Manchester.
On behalf of the Communications Consumer Panel, I have spoken at four of these events, outlining a study we have carried out tracking the 40 or so local initiatives on next generation broadband. The Manchester conference - the last in the current series - was held last week and was the most up-beat of the enthusiastic events.
The main reason for the excitement was the recent publication of the Digital Britain Final Report. As one speaker put it: "Digital Britain has changed the landscape". He said of the NGA debate: "It's leapt forward a long way".
Lord Carter - who produced the report - was not able to be present but recorded a video speech for the conference. His report recommended that investment in NGA in the 'final third' of the country be encouraged by the levying of 50 a month on all users of fixed lines and this is a proposal which has been supported in a statement by the CBN.
The Digital Britain Final Report gives encouragement to local NGA schemes but rightly calls for common technical standards and inter-operability. For this purpose, an initial £150,000 has been made available for a new organisation called the <a href="http://www.inca.coop">Independent Networks Cooperative Association</a> (INCA) and INCA was officially launched at the Manchester conference.
Last week I attended the launch of a broadband advice centre and mobile unit in Omagh for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), opened by Enterprise Minister Arlene Foster. The purpose of the unit is to help SME's and micro businesses (on which NI is economically dependent) get the best from ICT. Omagh is in the west of the province, which is deeply rural and grapples with most of the major issues with broadband and mobile telecoms.
The centre and the mobile unit are part of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment's (DETI) £3.9million, Log on-NI programme. This is designed to deliver free broadband advice to Northern Ireland's SMEs, enabling them to take advantage of the potential benefits of broadband. The programme is co-financed under the European Regional Development Fund Sustainable Competitiveness Programme 2007-2013.
Log on-NI has 10 trained broadband advisers already active in delivering broadband action plans to participating SMEs. It is a flexible programme where businesses can either visit the facilities at Gortrush Industrial Park in Omagh, or visit the mobile unit as it travels across the whole of Northern Ireland. Alternatively, a broadband adviser can go to an individual business premises to offer advice on site.
Commendium Limited, the company chosen to deliver the programme on behalf of DETI, has previous experience of working with SMEs to stimulate take-up and high value use of broadband. Their programme in Cumbria took ICT use in SME's from 17 to 70% in 3 yrs. The experience seems to show that companies that have fully embraced ICT and broadband are faring better in this current economic climate that those that have not. See www.commendium.com.
Log on-NI aims to stimulate take-up of services and to demonstrate how high value, innovative use of broadband by SMEs can deliver business expansion, increase competitiveness and market share, secure reductions in business overheads and increase productivity.
Log on-NI has the potential to make an important contribution to increasing digital participation in Northern Ireland. In providing advice and training on getting connected and understanding ICT it provides both SMEs, and the people who work in them, the opportunity to develop the range of skills required to participate fully in a digital society. Further details are at www.logon-ni.co.uk.
As always a lively and wide ranging set of discussions at the Panel. Some areas of wider interest include:
Mobile coverage: Over the past six months the Panel has got increasingly interested in problems with mobile coverage, so we commissioned a piece from the advisory team on what we might do to raise this issue up the agenda. The problem is that while the coverage statistics say that almost the whole of the country is covered, consumer and small business experience says otherwise. Technical details about the way the data is collected and reported can explain this difference, but the existing data gives a misleadingly good picture and the fact is that we don't really know how big a problem coverage is.
There are two kinds of issues for consumers and small businesses: some people are unable to get network coverage in their home or office and even more people are unable to get reliable coverage when using their phone when traveling. The Panel agreed that the next step for us is to find out more about the consumer experience of mobile coverage so we can establish how much of a problem it is for people and so how much importance we should attach to raising the profile of the problem.
ADR and complaints handling: We had a very interesting discussion with the Ofcom team working on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and complaints handling. We have always been supportive of proposals to reduce the time companies have to resolve complaints before consumers can go to ADR (from 12 to 8 weeks). But ADR remains a last resort, so getting complaints handling right inside service providers is a big prize that the Panel are interested in talking more about.
Colette Bowe: Colette came to her first Panel meeting as Chairman of Ofcom. We had a good discussion about the things on her personal agenda. These were highlighted in the Select Committee hearing, prior top her appointment: broadband, disability and digital switchover. These are, of course, all issues the panel are also concerned with. We also talked about some of the things that have been on the Panel's mind over the last few months and that we have been discussing with Ofcom staff. Colette will return to the Panel in six months or so and in the meantime, she and I will meet for a catch up every six weeks or so. These opportunities to speak direct to the Chairman of Ofcom have been a feature of the Panel from the very beginning and are a very important part of the special working relationship that we have with the regulator.
Anna
The Community Broadband Network has been organising a series of regional conferences throughout England to discuss the prospects for next generation access (NGA) or super fast broadband which is usually assumed to require either fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) or fibre to the home (FTTH). The sixth and last of these events will be held in Manchester on 23 June. On behalf of the Commuications Consumer Panel, I will have addressed four of these conferences which have identified considerable frustration at the roll-out of NGA in this country and a desire to promote local schemes.
The Fiber to the Home Council - a worldwide organisation - has identified 20 countries in the world where FTTH connections exceed 1% of homes. As the CBN events have underlined, the UK does not begin to figure in this league.
So how many FTTH connections are there in Britain today? At the CBN events, CBN Chairman Malcolm Corbett has joked that FTTH roll-out by BT is so slow that CBN projects now account for more FTTH connections that those of BT. Is this true? Just how many FTTH connections do we have in this country and is BT behind CBN?
The most advanced CBN project is at West Whitlawburn in Scotland which currently has around 60 live fibre connections. Some 40 of the properties have tenants and another 10 are scheduled to move in during the next week or so. BT's 'showcase' FTTH site is at Ebbsfleet (which I have visited), where the recession has slowed down developments considerably, and fibre connections are still only a little over 50.
Prior to its two local trials in Muswell Hill, London and Whitchurch, South Glamorgan, Openreach will has started a technical trial in the Foxhall exchange area of Kesgrave, Suffolk, but all three of these trials are fibre to the cabinet (FTTC).
So it seems that currently the UK has merely around 100 FTTH connections in use by consumers with BT and CBN pretty much neck-and-neck.
However, there is underway a BT/industry consultation on fibre to the premise (FTTP) on brownfield sites. BT plans to start trials between January and March 2010, giving FTTP potential coverage of up
to around 5,000 - 40,000 premises passed, subject to interest from communications providers.
This morning, the Communications Consumer Panel published research which shows that consumers believe that we are not very far from the point where broadband becomes so important that there are serious disadvantages from not having it. You can read the report on the website by clicking here.
Offering products and services over the internet is an increasingly attractive proposition both for the public sector and the private sector. Websites and clever algorithms allow providers to tailor services to the customer's needs and preferences. Arguably, many of these customer-focussed services can be offered via the phone, but the cost of providing a telephone system is much higher than the cost of running and maintaining a website.
I came across a few websites and situations recently that made me wonder whether we are not already crossing over to the time when there are seriousdisadvantages for people who have not got broadband access:
- Price comparison websites like moneysupermarket.com or confuse.com do not have off-line alternatives.
- The cheapest mortgage or insurance offers are often only available from online service providers.
- If you have missed a popular TV show like Britain's Got Talent and you want to join in the water cooler conversation about Susan Boyle you can only do that after watching her on a TV catch-up service or Youtube.
- Internet airline booking gives you cheaper fares or reduced booking fees.
- DVD rental sites such as lovefilm.com do not seem to offer a telephone alternative.
- There are many internet radio stations that are only available online.
- Many job vacancies are only advertised on web sites.
- As part of flexible working patterns, UK companies increasingly allow workers to work from home - and if much of your work involves computer use, this means accessing your company's server remotely over broadband.
There are also a few interesting example when we cross into the area of public services:
- The TV catch-up service BBC iPlayer, is seen as an essential part of the BBC's output, but is only available tot those with internet access.
- BBC schools website offers fantastic resources such as a free online typing course for kids - http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/
- My local school often asks children to do their homework on "link and learn": a website http://www.fleetvillejm.herts.sch.uk/pupils/index.html
where children can do exercises and pupils as well as teachers can write comments in their learning journal.
- The practice whereby rail franchises make cheaper fares available on the internet was recently branded as "unacceptable" by the Commons public accounts committee. It said that because many do not have access to the internet the concept of Britain's railways as a public service available to all has been "undermined" by this practice.
- There are public sector internet applications that might just be round the corner and that could become an essential part of our daily lives: what if a carer could have a daily catch-up with an older person via a webcam? What if schools start requiring you to submit your coursework online?
I think the writing is on the wall: we are moving to a society where you have to have access to the internet to get the best deals, the best information or the best educational support - and as the panel's research indicates: this should not happen without a parallel effort to get everyone online with a decent speed connection, and with the support they need to reap the benefits.
Leen Petré
There are many digital divides: a lack of access to basic broadband (say 512 kbit/s) which are the so-called 'not spots'; a lack of access to medium speed broadband (say 2 Mbit/s) which is what the Digital Britain proposal for a universal broadband commitment is seeking to address; a lack of access to super fast broadband (say more than the 24 Mbit/s that one can obtain from ADSL2+); and - very importantly - a lack of take-up even where there is access (some 40% of homes still do not take broadband at any speed).
The Communications Consumer Panel is engaged in all these debates and tracks all the latest data to show the extent of the various divides and the reasons for them. The most recent data was research published by the BBC which includes a map of the UK showing where it is not possible to receive either 0.5 Mbit/s or 2 Mbit/s. According to this research, about three million homes have broadband speeds of less than 2 Mbit/s.
This is the sort of speed that one will need to access the promised Project Canvas services and highlights the need for the sort of universal broadband commitment being considered by the Government.