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".

Initial fibre optic rollout done before the Olympics start?

BT have announced that their fibre-optic broadband trials have been successful, and as a result they have announced that they will complete their roll-out of fibre-optic broadband by 2012, a year ahead of schedule and just before the start of the London Olympics.  BT plans on spending £1.5 billion (€1.68 billion) on this upgrade for 40% of all urban areas, and these roll-outs will involve both FTTP (fibre to the premises) and FTTK/FTTC (fibre to the kerb). 

Virgin Media, BT's main competitor, can already provide high speed broadband with speeds up to 50 Mb/s, and Virgin Media plan on upgrading to 150 Mb/s by 2010, two years before BT's own upgrade is complete.  And other rollouts of FTTH via the sewers (which is really cost-effective) are being done by the likes of i3 Group (formerly H2O Networks), and the i3 Group say they can minimise homes sharing a single fibre optic network at the same time, as explained in their response to the OFCOM report on Gigabit Passive Optical Networks (GPON).

UK lagging in broadband quality

Recently a Broadband Quality Study was done, this is an annual study performed by the Saïd Business School and the University of Oviedo Applied Economics Department and sponsored by Cisco Systems . The purpose of this study was to compare broadband speeds and overall quality of service as well as broadband penetration, the measure of how much of the internet access market broadband takes up.

The UK needs Fibre to the Home

Fibre to the Home (FTTH) is an extremely fast form of broadband with typical speeds of up to 100Mb/s, but also capable of some of the fastest broadband speeds on the planet up to and including 1Gb/s or higher, even as high as 20Gb/s. Whereas in ADSL, soon to be the "new dial-up", the last kilometre between the telephone exchange and premises is copper wire, with Fibre to the Home the broadband connection is fibre optic all the way to the home or building. The FTTH penetration in the UK is negligible at the moment, and the UK is in danger of paying the price for not having FTTH installed years ago.