The U.K. government may think it has earned a back-slapping for connecting 3 million rural properties to broadband via the BDUK programme, but there is still plenty of work left to do.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said this week it is "on track" to cover 95% of premises by 2017, which is laudable, but begs the questions: how do we get to 95%, and what about those left behind?
"No one should be patting themselves on the back because an unambitious target is likely to be met in two years’ time," said Adam Marshall, executive director of policy and external affairs at the British Chambers of Commerce.
"Across the U.K., far too many businesses and consumers still have insufficient or unreliable broadband coverage, which stops entrepreneurs and exporters in their tracks," he said on Wednesday. "If we want to be the most prosperous country in the world, we need to have the best digital infrastructure in the world, and we’re a long way from that. Ministers and regulators need to set their sights – and their investment commitments – higher."
That is all well and good, but choosing the right combination of carrots and sticks with which to incentivise network deployment by the private sector is a huge challenge, particularly in the U.K., where "the focus of regulation over the last 15 years has been on cheap," said Matthew Hare, CEO of rural fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) provider Gigaclear.
"Cheap was OK if all you wanted to do was make phone calls, but that isn’t where we’re at now. Every property is now intricately connected through the Internet to loads of other services, and reliability and quality and bandwidth are now really important, and will be 100 times more important in five years time," he told Total Telecom this week.
BT faces pressure to make its wholesale services cheaper, he continued. "Cheaper is fine, but not if you want the company to also invest in upgrading and improving its infrastructure. The two do not go hand in hand."
If that’s t he case, perhaps others should take on the job of connecting the unconnected.
Back in October 2013, DCMS invited U.K. mobile operators to discuss how mobile networks might be used to extend broadband to final 10% of the country.
In December 2014, to avoid being forced into national roaming agreements, EE, O2, Vodafone and 3UK agreed to jointly allocate £5 billion of their combined capex budgets to eliminating not-spots.
Since then, EE and Vodafone have both trialled outdoor public access small cells in rural locations.
However, Hare argued that today’s mobile networks lack the capacity that home broadband users demand.
"Mobile is great when you want convenience," he said; however, it is less effective "if you want to have reliable service for multiple devices.
"In the nicest possible way, it’s using a whippet to pull a plough."
Unsurprisingly for the CEO of an FTTH provider, Hare doesn’t think copper networks are a suitable long-term solution for rural broadband either, even when new technologies like G.fast are thrown into the mix.
G.fast "is a sensible next step" in certain scenarios, such as multi-tenanted buildings in urban areas, he said.
However, G.fast can only support the highest broadband speeds on copper loops below 500 metres, so in rural areas where some premises are more than a kilometre away from the nearest cabinet, "the [speed] variability problems will be insurmountable," Hare said.
As far as Hare is concerned, that leaves fibre.
Gigaclear recently won three contracts to deploy FTTH networks in rural parts of Essex, Berkshire, and the Cotswolds.
"The reason for us building our business is that people want a product they cannot currently buy from any other source, and that isn’t going to go away any time soon," said Hare.
By the end of 2015, Gigaclear aims to pass 20,000 premises with Gigabit networks and to have 7,500 c ustomers live on its networks.
"For 2016 we plan to multiply this size of the company by a factor of three or four," Hare said.
Hmm, perhaps a Hare should be put in front of the plough instead.
