Slashdot Mirror
British Broadband Needs £1bn More Funding
judgecorp writes "A report from the London School of Economics says that funding for superfast broadband in Britain faces a £1.1 billion shortfall. It's a government priority, but rural areas are uneconomic to cable up. From the article: 'Britain is in danger of missing out on the economic and social benefits of superfast broadband due to a lack of government funding and e-skills, according to a new report.
Research by the London School of Economics (LSE) and Convergys claims a funding gap of £1.1 billion could cause the government to miss its target of having the “best superfast broadband network” in Europe by 2015.'"
it's a small country.. should be easy enough to set up national fixed wireless service that reaches all but the most remote areas (e.g. areas that'd need multiple towers to reach a handful of households)
for other industries they real beneficiaries are not the outlying regions but the connected in high places people who choose to have estates far from their primary place of work.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
At a time when austerity is the word of the day and cuts are being made all over the place, I wonder whether "superfast broadband" in rural areas is the best way to use limited resources. Presumably, people choose to live in rural areas because they derive benefits from that (clear air, outdoors, less crime, community, etc.). Good for them! But why should city dwellers subsidize their rural lifestyle? If you choose to live in a rural area with low population density, you have to accept that perhaps your internet connexion will not be as fast as if you lived in bustling city.
Just before the 2010 general election, the now ex-Labour government shoved through (mostly) to BT, the main backbone company in the UK £10bn to upgrade switches etc. to enable spying on all phone calls and internet traffic in real time. Imagine what you could do for an economy instead of spying on people, you built a phone / data network that is faster than your competitors for businesses.
Oh well, you can dream on with politicians having common sense. They are more worried about themselves and what people are saying about them, than worrying about the economy.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
any plan where a bureaucrat uses the word "e-skills"?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Hardly, there are some fixed costs with regards to laying fiber/cable.
They may have to lay several miles of cable and the HW which would easily costs in the tens of thousands, just to reach a single person.
That person may genuinely want the service, but it's just not economically viable to run it out there to him and him alone.
How amusing - our dear little con-dem Government reckons Britian will have the best superfast broadband by 2015, do they? Well, they might like to "encourage" BT to pull its finger out and upgrade all the exchanges to ADSL2 for a start. There are thousands of small exchanges stuck about 5 years in the past and no plans whatsoever to upgrade them.
Meanwhile all the effort seems to be going to towns and cities, the places that already have the choice of cable or ADSL2 or fibre to the cabinet. They really ought to splunk that cash on bringing everyone up to speed instead, but no, as it's all about money it's far more efficient for them just to push ahead where there's already fast broadband.
I think there's more chance of the Sun suddenly exploding than there is of the UK having the best superfast broadband by 2015.
Superfast broadband is great, but are there really economic and social benefits?
Fast broadband makes a difference to entertainment but hardly necessary for employment, communication or accessing public services. Unless the government has plan to put high end tech jobs out in the depths of the Scottish highlands I would have thought that 4 MBps would do just fine. I struggle to see why I should subsidise some farmers access to NetFlix.
Who commissioned this report again? Any danger of the LSE coming to the conclusions the client wanted?
Then don't. Seriously, so much noise is made in the UK about universal access to broadband and the majority of it is people complaining that the speeds they get are terrible. Or that BT has told them they need to pay thousands if they want connecting. What do all of these people have in common? They live in rural areas often right in the middle of nowhere.
The papers love this kind of thing as it allows then to print headlines like "Rural Pensioner charged £90,000 for broadband setup". Ignoring what should be obvious to anyone which is if you choose to live in a remote location then you have to accept that there may be downsides to that decision. One of those downsides will inevitably be poorer access to services. Expecting any company (or government) to run miles of cable and install switching equipment for the sake of one house is ludicrous.
In the same way I can't move to the middle of nowhere and then complain that I have to walk miles to buy a paper in the morning, complaining about not having access to the best broadband speeds is hardly reasonable.
In that case the person needs to sit down and think hard about his choice to live where he does. The government subsidising roll out of broadband to every remote cottage in order to be able to claim 100% availability is a tremendous waste of money.
When you choose where to live you take into account a lot of different factors, nearby schools, sports facilities, local restaurants or amenities. Why is broadband any different from anything else? Last time I moved I checked likely ADSL speeds and availability of cable online when I was making a short list of properties.
I can't move to a remote location and then demand someone comes and builds a pub next door so I don't have to walk so far for a pint. Why should I expect someone to run miles of expensive cable to my door.
If the ISPs will continue to limit how much you can download each month as if there is a limited supply of "internets". ISPs in the UK (no idea what it is like across the pond) seem to follow the same business model that the movie/music industry does and until that changes, I don't see a valid reason for this and I live in one of those areas considered "rural England". Many people I know don't need 'super-fast' and don't care for it. In fact most just care how much it costs and when ISPs start offering "super-fast broadband" they will also start offering super-high prices. The entire way internet services is sold in the UK is dodgy as hell (again, no idea what it is like across the pond). Each provider tries to sell you their own internet and tell you it is better then the rest. They are still selling WiFi as part of their packages as if it is a rare commodity that no-one else provides or is able to get and make it sound as if it is something exclusive to "their internet".
The main UK problem is that backhaul from the exchanges is very expensive (and metered, believe it or not) unless you put equipment at all of them. This makes it almost impossible to compete with the few carriers who DO have equipment at all exchanges. Therefore broadband competition only exists in the cities where you can get enough subscribers that it is worth putting in your own equipment. Then add FTTC, where it is impossible for more than one carrier to put in equipment. There simply isn't room or power available for each carrier to be able to put in their own DSLAM in a cabinet, so competitors are forced to use the expensive and metered lines from the main carrier.
The result is that service in the rural areas is slow, expensive and metered, and service in urban areas is either cheap and slow (ADSL2+) or fast, expensive and metered (FTTC).
Just to make it worse, it is legal to tie customers in for long contracts. Right now BT won't sell you an FTTC line for love or money unless you indenture yourself for 18 months.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I think you missed the point and your argument has nothing to do with my post.
OP was asserting that nothing is uneconomic if someone want's it really bad. And if it IS uneconomic then it's just that they were pretending to want it.
I disagree, there are cases where the customer may want it, but cannot afford to pay for the $60,000 to cover the necessary enterprise grade networking equipment.
Virgin media posted Cable TV, broadband and phone 2010 as best year ever as revenues hit £3.8bn
BT pre-tax profits of £1bn 2010
BskyB Revenue also rose to £5.9bn, up more than 10% on the £5.4bn recorded a year earlier.
There is lots of money to invest just the companies dont want to - they would rather charge for over priced and poor quality services to keep the share holders happy.
A few years ago I would have felt sorry for people without broadband or the Internet. Now I envy them.
There hasn't been anything good on the Internet in years. It's all crap. Reading the Internet will make you stupid now.
"In that case the person needs to sit down and think hard about his choice to live where he does."
Subsidy of country living is what makes country housing so expensive for the people who can barely afford to live there.
When there is no broadband and bus service then the price of country housing will go down.
City dwellers who can't afford country housing wonder why they have to subsidise those who do have that enjoyment.
blog.sam.liddicott.com
The british mainland is 800 miles long (1000 miles if you include the shetland and scilly isles) with 200 miles of mountains in scotland. While it may be small compared to the USA or russia its quite big compared to a lot of other countries.
I get a bit tired of my country being pigeonholed as some tiny little quaint island one step up from marthas vineyard or similar.
Aye. Also, in most cases, people live in rural areas because they want to be away from the 'hubub' of city life. There are choices and expenses associated with each.
Why not just make sure a hub is available to the regions (guaranteed to be within a certain distance), and leave the onus of the "last mile", up to the residents?
Yes - I know farmers have no choice but to live in less dense regions. However, in my experience. they tend to prefer these less dense regions, and in more than a few cases, either that's why they chose farming, or they consider a perk to the job.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
That works out to 16 pounds per person. That's less than one months revenue for the network operators.
weren't you here yesterday ;)? we've solved this with frickin' laser pointers for about £200. http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/05/03/0049211/1gbps-wireless-network-made-with-red-and-green-laser-pointers
sag
We can raise that for them. C'mon slashdotters, start eating those hotpockets!
There was an ISP in the USA that decided it was worth it to to run fiber to it's 30k customers, who were spread over 5,000 square miles or 13,000km2. That's an average of 6 people/mi2 or 2.3/km2.
How "rural" are these areas that they're not worth it?
If there is a real benefit to having rural broadband, the customers will make it pay. If it is uneconomic, it means that people don't really want it as much as they pretend to.
Now what with all of this government meddling?
Unfortunately the actions of the telecom company has made it unattractive to club together and get broadband. Where villages have clubbed together to buy a leased line and set up an area wifi, BT has installed a faster line than they ordered and then offers internet in the village itself. In other words people have paid a few hundred pounds each and signed up to a share of a community line at a cost which is now greater than BT's internet - because they paid for a line to be installed.
I think you missed the point and your argument has nothing to do with my post.
OP was asserting that nothing is uneconomic if someone want's it really bad. And if it IS uneconomic then it's just that they were pretending to want it.
I disagree, there are cases where the customer may want it, but cannot afford to pay for the $60,000 to cover the necessary enterprise grade networking equipment.
There are a lot of things I want but cannot afford to pay. Will the government build me a swimming pool and buy me a porche?
I thought that Britain is in danger of missing out on the economic and social benefits of superfast broadband due to The Pirate Bay being blocked.
Thankyou Ladies and germs. I'm here all week.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Mmm, for an existing provider the question is not "how much are we making now?", it's "how much more would we make if we offered faster services and/or wider coverage and how much would it cost us to do that?"
And for a new upstart the question is "can we displace enough customers from the incumbent to pay for our fixed costs?"
How much does going from say 5mbps to 50mbps improve the internet experiance for normal users? how much extra do you think most people would pay for that improvement?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
As a Canadian, I find the notion of rural areas in Britain being uneconomic to cable up to be quite hilarious.
The UK just spent 24 billion Pounds on the Olympics and nobody wanted those...
Surely they could have spent this money better on something like this broadband project... and with that much money left, give everyone a free PC!
I agree with you that there is a element of life choice involved here, especially for the young (and by young, I mean less than 60) There is the same concern for giving unemployment benefit to people that live in region/town where there is no work and where there has been no work for generations.
There is however the other side of the coin, at least from the government perspective:
1. High concentration of people have their costly problems too: traffic, sanitation, power and water distribution. And then the government also need to help people to deal with higher cost of living (or if you don't people to help people living in cities, you need to deal with people not finding work, catch 22)
2. There is a cost associated to letting the country side die or fall behind: tourism (visitor and local product), business opportunities (country side outsourcing), equal opportunities (you don't know where the next Steve Jobs will be born)
Wiring the whole country is certainly a waste of money (that being said, we did it with water, sanitation, road, electricity, phonelines before), however there is certainly a balance to reach for the good of the country. (note that all those costs are externalities - there is no other way but for the government to pay)
could cause the government to miss its target of having the âoebest superfast broadband networkâ in Europe by 2015.
Surely the government jests. They seem to think that getting Virgin and BT to install FTTC is going to get us there, but clearly nothing short of a full FTTH roll-out is going to work. Fujitsu offered to do it but that would have upset Tory party donors.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
where can I find out about this prize? I can't find a reference to it on the net... I have some ideas to enter. grow some imagination
> cause the government to miss its target of having the “best superfast broadband network” in Europe by 2015.'
I'm curious as to how fast the best network is considered to be in Europe currently and what the target of the government is. The article is severely lacking in this information.
My city of 17k got a federal grant for installing fiber because we're classified as "rural". I think "rural" needs to be defined as I think the government is using something other than the dictionary. Not to say the USA and UK governments use the same definition, but it brings up the issue of different definitions.
In that case the person needs to sit down and think hard about his choice to live where he does./quote
Exactly. If I lived in the middle of the nearest city I'd have 100Mbps cable broadband. I'd also be paying twice as much to live there, have no garden, nowhere to park and lots of noise.
I live out in the sticks where I get 5Mbps broadband, have a big garden, plenty parking, dark skies and it's quiet. There's also not a lot of RF floating about too, with all the noise and clatter from cheap plasma TVs and crappy wifi routers.
It's awesome.
Exactly. If I lived in the middle of the nearest city I'd have 100Mbps cable broadband. I'd also be paying twice as much to live there, have no garden, nowhere to park and lots of noise. I live out in the sticks where I get 5Mbps broadband
Wow. Maybe England would like to run the broadband to the rural areas of the US. I can barely get 1.5Mbps. And I only live two miles from town along a main road.
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Chaps, I hate to say it, but I'm going to need another 1B pounds sterling. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that if you don't come up with the money, you're in danger of missing out on the economic and social benefits of superfast broadband. Those are some fantastic knees, by the way.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Because we have a universal service agreement?
I don't know what it's like in England, that's a different country. I guess they could organise someone to run rural broadband in your part of Mexico.