Next-generation broadband products for the last mile
must be based on fibre, according to a report commissioned by
Ofcom.
At the recently held Communications Management Association
conference, Ofcom chairman Lord Currie told telecom managers that
the comms regulator remained unconvinced about the role of
high-speed fibre in the last mile.
He said DSL broadband may well prove to be an adequate solution
to support the UK’s future internet access needs.
But the Ofcom-commissioned report from
Plextek, which
was a six-month study into the role of wireless broadband, has said
fibre to the home and office has an important role to play, to
ensure the UK does not get left behind other countries when it
comes to high-speed connectivity.
A recent research report from Informa said Western Europe now
had over one million fibre connections to the home, to enable users
to get access to the internet far faster than standard DSL
broadband speeds.
The Informa report, however, pointed out that these connections
were mainly in Sweden, France and the Netherlands.
The Plextek reports says the UK needs fibre if it is going to
adopt applications like IPTV, which needs bandwidth far in excess
of what DSL broadband has to offer.
The report says a combination of fibre connectivity backbone
networks combined with fixed and wireless gigabit connections in
the last mile are the way forward.
The Metronet network in Manchester supplies such a combination
to businesses, the local authority and the police.
Steve Methley, senior consultant at Plextek, said, “Future high
definition (HD) TV services are likely to demand undiluted access
to streaming content at 10-15Mb/s per channel, which is massively
in excess of what today’s ADSL systems can support.
“Not enough people understand that today’s ADSL is a contended
service - delivered rates may fall to only hundreds of kb/s,” he
said.
Contention rates in broadband exchanges can currently see an
8mbps broadband connection being shared by over 20 users.
The Plextek study found that wireless cannot realistically
compete with fibre for the provision of future broadband
requirements over the whole of the last mile.
The report says that upcoming wireless standards show a bias
towards small screen mobile content delivery and are not attempting
to address the challenge of “Broadband 2.0” requirements, like
HDTV.
Fibre can solve the contention issues by increasing back haul
capacity and can solve the last mile issue by acting as a point to
point solution alone, said Plextek.
Plextek is an independent research company which counts BAE
Systems, the MoD, QinetiQ, Raytheon, TDK and Sony among it
clients.
Related article:
Fibre connections to the home in Western Europe top 1
million
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