Fibre to the Home

The government has now given a clear indication that its wants providers to start moving towards providing Fibre to the home

In Wednesday's Autumn Statement, Chancellor Philip Hammond will announce £400m funding for a new Digital Infrastructure Investment Fund.
Private investors will be asked to match the amount.

The money will be aimed at fibre broadband providers who are looking to expand.

The UK must move towards providing "fibre-to-the-property" broadband, rather than fibre to the roadside cabinet, the Chancellor will say.

£400m is a start but isn't going to go that far. I wonder if this is more recycling of past commitments or if it is "new money".

will be interesting to see if anyone decides to do anything about it -

Best guess, it'll allow BT to offer more competition to Virgin. Doubt it'll make any difference to anyone out of the cities.

Government involvement in a large IT project. I'm sure that will work out well.

No doubt pleasing the rural voters.

FTTP is welcome to me in Birmingham. To be honest FTTC is welcome, infact anything greater than 5mb would be lovely.

As someone in a rural area with an EO line that isn't being addressed by the current BDUK efforts, this extra money sounds encouraging.

However, it doesn't change the economics - providing FTTP to a small number of rural properties is simply not as attractive as a more densely populated urban area.

Therefore I suspect that this is actually a negative thing for rural businesses, which will simply become even more disadvantaged as their urban competitors get even better broadband and gain the competitive advantage that fast broadband promises.

When there was a speed differential of a factor of two or three there wasn't much of a difference. A factor of 100 makes a big difference to a business. By the time rural businesses have the promised 10Mbps in 2020+, their urban competitors will have had 100+Mbps for some time. Rural businesses will die, and the money that was supposed to help them will be responsible for the changes that killed them.

And are Openreach to be allowed to charge more to help pay back this private investment?

I cannot see investors willing to wait decades to see a return on their £400m. OFCOM will have to loosen the pricing screws on FTTH to see an adequate return on investment.

50% of the cost is being provided by the government and it is not limited to Rural areas. In a lot of rural areas the lines are overhead which makes it cheaper to install the fibre

NOTE: This is not money for BT.

Overhead fibre may be cheaper, depends on the cost of PIA2 and what premises you are trying to serve, i.e. rural areas are very much you need to visit to plan the most optimal routing.

£400m split 2 million ways is not a lot, add match funding, and still not a lot if ALL the studies on the cost of rural FTTH are correct. B4RN if I recall is at the low end of those at £800/premise passed but that is using lots of volunteer labour - the upside of volunteer labour is that it ensures high community engagement, but this also relies on ready access to fields to cross across rather than working alongside traffic on roads.

There is not the faintest chance that this money will be used to overlap VM areas in anything but a marginal way, whether by BT or not. VM would (rightly) be straight to court with it.

VM could apply for it themselves - I wonder if they would be stopped from overlapping BT areas?

I heard you on Radio 2 today but annoyingly I only caught the end of the conversation...

The same rules would surely apply. Also, VM have never applied for state money before as they'd have to offer wholesaling services. Small altnets may be allowed to get away with state funding without a wholesaling responsibility, but I doubt a major network operator covering over half the premises in the country would be allowed to do it.

There's always iPlayer

Still waiting to get the call from people who were on show, for one I've emailed them after figuring out their email address with suggestions that might help boost speeds a bit at least.

Rumour central - more about making commercial rates of funding available, rather than subsidising, and thus different rules as everything has to be paid back - so it seems. Hopefully the appendices on Wednesday will have more detail, but am expecting to not find much based on past experience of the Budget Statement paperwork.

Given that banks will lend money happily if they think they'll get it back, then I don't see it making a big difference to VM or BT. If the lending conditions aren't on commercial terms (with commercial risks) then it would still be seen as state subsidy, at least whilst we are in the EU.

In any event, £400m will not go that far and can you see Tory back benchers with poorly served rural constituents going along with seeing money (loans or not) being given to provide a third alternative in areas already well served commercially? People might want 1gbps in urban areas, but is it such a "need" that it justifies this?

I think this is about right. We'll see (or not) tomorrow.

It's a shame that the segment on Radio 2 managed to dredge up the regular complaints about broadband - which would be mostly handled by the remainder of BDUK or the USO projects.

This particular funding is surely about neither of those aims.

One place for clues might be to go back to Matt Hancock's speech at BBWF. These are his main three prongs to future strategy:

In reference to www.gov.uk/government/speeches/broadband-world-forum:

First, we must complete the rollout of universal 4G and superfast broadband between now and 2020.

Second, we must deliver deeper connectivity now in areas of deep need, and support a competitive market for delivery.

Third, we must start work now on ubiquitous 5G and fibre over the decade ahead.

Whatever the money is for, it is likely to be to meet one of these 3 aims. I still can't make up my mind whether I think it is more for the second or the third.

In reply to a post by TheEulerID:

Given that banks will lend money happily if they think they'll get it back, then I don't see it making a big difference to VM or BT. If the lending conditions aren't on commercial terms (with commercial risks) then it would still be seen as state subsidy, at least whilst we are in the EU.

I thought one of the outcomes of the MTP was that it wasn't so easy to get hold of money as an alt-net.

It wouldn't surprise me for the government to use this in a way that BT and VM cannot complain about.

No doubts here, its the third point and if it takes some from sub 2 Mbps to hyper fast all the better, but where to go is in the alt-net hands