UK government reveals broadband strategy, no commitment to FTTH

Today, Jeremy Hunt, the UK Secretary of State for Culture, the Olympics, Media, and Sport, has announced the coalition government's national broadband strategy, outlined in "Britain's Superfast Broadband Future", in which "super-fast broadband" is promised, and also mentions bringing a "Digital Hub" to every community, specifically aimed at rural communities. The UK government pledges £830 million (€980 million) towards rural communities, and two-thirds and 70% of work for the rest of the country is to be carried out by the private sector.

What was omitted from the strategy was what "super-fast" means, and although FTTH has been mentioned in the strategy document, and there is also no explicit commitment to support increasing FTTH deployments and eventually having FTTH to every building. There are no targets either in the NGA (next generation access) strategy plan to reach, all that has been pleged is that the UK is to "have the best broadband network in Europe by 2015".

National Broadband Strategy - "Superfast" broadband

As part of the government's national broadband strategy, all the government has committed to is:

• Universal Service Obligation of 2 Mb/s broadband for all by 2015 (not 2012 as the previous government had pledged)
• To help roll-out "super-fast" (Next Generation Access or NGA) broadband into the "final third" of UK towns and villages for whom private sector investment alone is not enough.
  

Why only 2 Mb/s? that is far too low and not even close to future-proof.  Why not have 50 Mb/s as a bare minimum, or even 100 Mb/s as will be explained later on in this article. These sort of speeds are the minimum needed to support future applications, not only BBC iPlayer, but future applications and websites that have not been made yet. The EU are pledging that every European ciitzen should have basic broadband by 2013, and real super-fast broadband by 2020 (the EU are aiming for between 30 Mb/s and 100 Mb/s). 

Within the UK, the de facto definition of "super-fast" is 24 Mb/s, which is not super-fast at all, maybe it was 30 years ago. In fact, many people do not even get close to that speed, the average UK broadband download speed is 5.2 Mb/s (another study says 5.55 Mb/s), and upload speeds are much slower at 0.623 Mb/s.  The connection speeds for download and upload are not the same (they are asymmetric).  By contrast, FTTH connection speeds are the same for both downloads and uploads.

And using FTTC is not a solution, that only brings speeds from 40 Mb/s to 60 Mb/s, which is hardly future-proof, and at best temporary (the remaining VDSL copper will have to be converted to FTTH eventually).

Now 100 Mb/s is super-fast, and 1 Gb/s has already been deployed in Japan, and 1 Gb/s is due to reach South Korea by 2012. In both Japan and South Korea, 100Mb/s broadband speeds are common. Given that 1 Gb/s is possible, and that BT has already trialled 1 Gb/s, this is a perfectly good reason to make the universal service obligation 100 Mb/s eventually, and perhaps 50 Mb/s in the interim.

FTTH Council urged the UK government to do more on FTTH

Back in July this year, the FTTH Council has urged the UK to do much more for its FTTH deploymenrs, and their market forecast report suggests that the UK will be the last country in Europe to achieve 20% subscribers in FTTH, called "fibre maturity" by the FTTH Council. This is estimated to be between two to four years after France, Germany, and Italy.

UK members of the FTTH Council state the following reasons why FTTH progress has been extremely slow in the UK, including:

• Lack of clarity on key policy issues such as infrastructure sharing
• Lack of competitively priced backhaul connectivity for new networks
• Consumer confusion over marketing of broadband services
• No clear funding mechanism for local authorities to bring fibre to rural areas

And I would also add there has been no clear commitment from governments to support deployment of FTTH.  The FTTH Council were also critical of BT's planned strategy to deploy FTTC.

In France, FTTH subscriptions rose 14.5% to an estimated 38 700 in the end of June 2010. It is available in parts of the major cities, and not available in every area yet but France appears to be making much more progress compared to the UK. In UK there are less than 5 000 FTTH subscribers in a handful of locations (Ebbsfleet, Wembley City, Liverpool ONE - all new build housing locations).

Also as of June 2010, Sweden has more than 500,000 FTTH subscriptions, and many Eastern European countries including Lithuania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Estonia have more FTTH subscribers than the UK (household percentages and absolute numbers). However, another report warns that Europe as a whole is risking falling behind in FTTH penetration.

On the other hand, back in 2007, Japan was estimated to have had 10 million FTTH subscribers, and South Korea had 37% of its homes connected by FTTH in 2009.

Original articles

• UK Government reveals national broadband strategy and new rural digital hubs - ISPReview UK, 6/12/2010
• UK Government: Superfast Broadband for all by 2015 - TheNextWeb, 6/12/2010
• FTTH Council Urges UK to boost its Superfast Fibre Optic Broadband - ISPReview UK, 9/6/2010