There's a growing debate about the roll out in the UK of what is variously called super fast broadband, next generation broadband, or - to use the technical term - next generation access (NGA).
Besides the 'national' plans of Virgin Media and BT, there is an increasing number of local initiatives and the Communications Consumer Panel has been mapping these various initiatives for a study which it has published today. We found almost 40 schemes and you can check out the full list in our report here.
As will be seen, the various schemes are of very different sizes and at very different stages of development, but collectively they represent a range of funding and business models and of technical delivery options that should contribute significantly to the national debate on the timing and form of the roll-out of NGA in the UK.
The Communications Consumer Panel hopes that it has done a service in bringing together what we believe to be the most comprehensive survey to date. We would welcome further information on any of the schemes that we have mentioned and on any initiatives not covered in this review. Please post your comments on this blog.
This is certainly the most comprehensive directory of the UK's next generation projects and the Consumer Panel's efforts should be applauded. What the report highlights very well is the great diversity of approaches, business models, and organisations that are embarking on next generation projects - something which underlines the shift to NGA is not evolutionary but revolutionary. While of course the major traditional organisations like BT and Virgin are playing a key role, they can't do it alone. Old lines are being crossed and new relationships are forming in ways which couldn't be imagined in the past. This is something which will need to be understood and supported by the regulatory regime. This paper is a key learning point in this process.
I found this information really helpful and valuable. With Lord Carter's Digital Britain report due soon, this is a timely and most helpful contribution to the debate. It is probably worth mentioning that many rural communities would prefer fibre to bandwidth limited radio based services - not because we are expert at technology, but because we do understand enough about the service delivery options to know that the services we want will swallow up more than radio can comfortably economically deliver. Where we are, we don't even get analogue TV, and a fibre based service would fix this problem for good, as well as making it worth us paying for licences to receive a service that we will finally be able to get! One could debate as an interesting legal exercise why the licence fees really are paid, to own a device able to receive a signal or some other reason...but to have to pay and get a lousy or no service is unsatisfactory in the extreme. Once again, thanks for caring about the rural consumer.
Extract from CBN's Newsletter 1 - 2009 The number of next generation projects around the country is growing fast. The OFCOM Consumer Panel has just published a summary of local initiatives. CBN’s team has been working with partners on many of these for over a year. Our efforts are finally paying off as the first projects move from the drawing board into reality. In each case they are delivering fibre to the premises (FTTP) capable of delivering very high speed services. A key facet of these projects is that the fibre is seen as a long term community asset, something that is reflected in the ownership model and financing. The first fibre project to go live is in a new build development by the West Whitlawburn Housing Co-op in Cambuslang, Glasgow. The co-op is building 100 new homes to complement the existing estate of 540+ apartments. CBN was commissioned to manage the fibre project with the first homes coming on stream in February. West Whitlawburn is focused on digital inclusion and so is particularly keen that residents have access to high speed broadband, despite serious poverty in the community. Though a comparatively small project it is a first for Scotland and for the social housing sector nationally. The second project that is rapidly moving from aspiration to reality is in the small town of Alston, Cumbria. The people of Alston famously created the successful Cybermoor project that brought wireless broadband to the area years before ADSL. Daniel Heery, director of Cybermoor, is determined to keep Alston ahead of the game by providing fibre connections throughout the town and surrounding moor. Alston is the most sparsely populated parish in England, so delivering high speed broadband here through community enterprise is a great model for other rural areas. Alston Fibremoor will establish a benchmark in the costs of deployment and the feasibility of rural next generation broadband access. The third project steaming ahead is in Manchester where the City Council through Manchester Digital Development Agency commissioned CBN to develop a pilot FTTP project initially covering 500-1000 premises in the Oxford Road area of the city. This part of Manchester is undergoing regeneration and includes student areas, small businesses in the cultural industry sector and some of the more deprived parts of the city. The plan is to create a ‘living lab’ where new applications and services based on high speed broadband can be developed and trialled. Tenders for the fibre build will be sought in the next few weeks.
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