The key to a fast roll-out of high-speed broadband will be to
stimulate and aggregate demand for it, says the chairman of the
UK's main broadband advisory group.
Antony Walker, chairman of the
Broadband Stakeholders Group, said high levels of
pre-registration and pre-contract commitments, especially in rural
areas, would give investors and network operators the confidence to
build high-speed networks.
Walker's comments came on top of a
BSG report,
just out, that sketched different scenarios for rolling out
broadband connections nationwide, and their costs. The cheapest,
providing optical fibre to the telephone cabinet on the street (or
kerb) would cost £5.1bn. The most expensive, providing each of the
UK's 28 million households with its own optical fibre link, would
cost £28.8bn, the report said.
The report is part of the BSG's input to the Department for
Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform's (BERR)
imminent Caio
report on next-generation broadband.
BERR said 93% of UK households have access to an (advertised)
2Mbit/s connection. Urban users can buy it for less than £15 per
month, but many
rural users cannot get the same speeds or prices as urban users
because they live farther from a BT exchange, says
Which?
Computer, a consumer rights advocate.
The government is keen to see faster broadband networks because
it believes they will extend the reach of new applications such as
high-definition video, the
BBC's iPlayer video
on-demand service and time-critical file sharing.
It expects they will also support on-line shopping, and delivery
of public services such as personalised healthcare and distance
education, as well as
"the
internet of things", where machines exchange data with other
machines, largely independently of people.
Walker said the models developed by research firm Analysys
Mason, ignored wireless technologies in addition to fibre, even
though wireless technologies were likely to play a key role in
providing
high-speed access in rural areas. Wireless networks cost less
than fibre-based ones because there is less civil engineering to
do.
"Our purpose was to provide a cost model for the commercial
deployment of fibre to the home and to the kerb," said Walker.
He said the high fixed cost component of the network relative to
the variable cost meant that profitability was very sensitive to
customer adoption.
He said commercial network operators would "deploy when there
was a high take-up on day one". This might be hard to do in rural
areas where there are fewer people to drive demand.
Walker said illegal file sharing by some peer-to-peer networks
and high-speed download sites such as BitTorrent had helped to
drive up demand. The government was clamping down on this, but
there was enough legitimate content to attract users, he said.
Aggregating public sector traffic and applications, as North
Yorkshire County Council has done with its
NYnet 30Gbit/s optical fibre ring network, might provide a base
load big enough to attract operators' interest, he said. "The
government has still to define its role," he said.