Carter report must try harder, say forum delegates

TheDigital Britain reportcontained too little detail about implementation, according to senior representatives from the communications industry.

While welcoming the initiative, executives from broadcasting, telecommunications, advertising, computer games and Google told delegates that the Carter report was a good start, but too much was left unresolved. They were attending a feedback meeting organised by the Westminster eForum.

It was still unclear whether even the government's basic promise to have a national 2Mbps broadband service by 2012 was a maximum or a minimum speed, said Andy King, director of telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent's UK and Irish business.

"The difference has big cost implications for the network provider," he said.

Money was high on most speakers' agendas. The BBC's CEO Caroline Thompson said the report was clearly good for the BBC, despite unresolved issues over "top-slicing" the licence fee to fund content creation by local and regional publishers and broadcasters.

Carolyn McCall, CEO of the Guardian Media Group, said her company was committed to digital and online publishing. However, the BBC's expansion into online areas worried her. She said the BBC's free online content, which was paid for from the licence fee, stopped her from charging for news and other content where the Guardian competed with the BBC. This removed a potential source of revenue to the commercial online sector, she said.

London Business School's Patrick Barwise, an expert on the advertising industry, said 60% of online advertising went to paid search, 20% to classified or transaction driven events, and 20% to display or brand-building.

He said Google took half the total UK online adspend and sent nearly all of it out of the country. It re-invested nothing in long-term UK content development, he said.

Peter Barron, Google UK's communications director, did not respond directly to the point. "We don't do content," he said, adding Google distributed more than $5bn to pay per click customers.

Referring to financial losses due to copyright theft, he said people were uploading 20 hours of video a minute to YouTube. It was almost impossible to "pre-screen" the content, he said, so Google had developed tools that allowed copyright owners to take down unlicensed material.

"Ninety percent of copyright owners decide to leave their material there because they can monetise it," he said.

BT's director of industry policy and regulation, Emma Gilthorpe, said the proposed 50p/month levy on fixed-wire phones to fund broadband roll-out to uneconomic areas was a welcome stimulus to invest in areas that would otherwise not receive broadband. However, BT wanted access to the networks of anyone who won money for that purpose, she said.

BT has so far refused to grant others access to its ducts and other network infrastructure.

Several speakers spoke of the need to ensure that local and regional public network operators had ready and easy connectivity to the backbone networks run by BT, Virgin Media, Cable & Wireless and others.

This was essential for consumers and businesses to be able to get seamless and consistent end to end connections, said Alcatel-Lucent's King.

Speaking from the floor, Niall Murphy, founder of The Cloud wifi network, said consumer demand for high speed capacity was expected to rise 100-fold by 2015.

He called on policy makers to give more attention to the role wireless and unlicensed (free) spectrum (such as 2.1GHz) could play in increasing access in "fill-in" areas not served directly by traditional network operators.