It looks to be a very serious challange to BT they have the big ISP's on board and the two biggest players in Network Hardware & Infrustructure and they have big bucks to spend as well.

And it's a much stronger case for BDUK/taxpayer funding.

We could give it to BT so as to buy them the beginnings of a network (corporate socialism) to, at some point, maybe begin to rival Virgin Media's, with no real clear defined plan or accountability, leaving the same one incumbent player, poor or no choice for the consumer, and a slow creep forwards with technologies that are already out of date.

Or we could give it to the consortium which then finally starts to rectify every single previously intractable issue described in this thread.

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

Interesting the Virgin Consortium is far more advanced then was aware of and they have now gone public with it.

The pigs really are flying!!!!!!

The consortium approach gives them access to EU & Westminster funding and of course they can argue the case they are provding areas that BT does not want to know about

They unlike BT who are rolling out trailing edge technology will be rolling out leading edge technology capable of a minimum of 1Gbs & Cisco & Fujitsu have deep pockets and its a nice way of keeping their factories & engineers busy

These talks moved on far faster then I was expected. I was expecting an announcement in Q3

Edited by deleted (Wed 13-Apr-11 15:42:38)

In reply to a post by Bob_s2:

The Broadband Market is really no different to the Mobile phone market.The key difference is the mobile phone market is about a 100 times better at marketing and selling. In the end a mobile phone is just a basic tool for making calls & sending text but they manage to sell al sorts of add ons that mosr people really dont need and get them to pay a premium price

Broadband is as much an essential need nowadays but the marketing is no where near as good as for the mobile market just look at how many will now take up Broadband on a mobile phone. Broadband on a mobile phone is very much a comprimise and commands a premium price yet people will pay for it.

I disagree with doing away with the £10 Broadband. That targets a different market to higher end products. They will be making a profit on it. Supermarkets do the same thing they will have a Basic Range at low prices to cater for the low end of the market

£10 is mostly a loss leader product price. if it is even possible to make any kind of sustainable profit it will be tiny and hence coming back to the profit been too small to justify investment. Cant have it both ways.

Supermarket's basic ranges have shot up in price lately (like all food) so bad examplefor your argument

I am not all out against cheap broadband but it certianly should be lower speed to encourage people to spend more, 8/24mbit for sub £15 isnt a good idea if wanting to increase revenue per user.

I know poor people and in all honesty they could afford £20 a month for broadband and I expect they would pay it, as they all rely on it (saves them money elsewhere and it its useful for them). Those who are really resistant and consider themselves to not use it enough to justify the expense have things like PAYG 3G as an option.

certianly looks interesting but I see where the uk is heading now.

This country is heading towards a very unique rollout.

Most countries rollout based on population density.

I think in 5 years time we are going to see a lot of rural covered as well as affluent parts of the country , but poor inner city areas will be left behind as BT wont touch them and the rural's did all the moaning which has led to focus been put on them.

In terms of FTTP/H it does seem rural isnt only going to catchup but will surpass urban.

In reply to a post by WWWombat:

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

Consider if electricity worked like broadband does. You move in to your new home and notice that every time you turn on the kettle, the fridge goes off. You call the private electricity company which is backed by a private largely unregulated infrastructure provider.

After being warned you could face huge bills for a call out, you take the plunge, an engineer arrives, and concludes that there's no fault.

Actually, it's your fault for living 3km away from the substation. You cannot seriously expect to get the same current at that distance, surely. You'll just have to put up with it. Your options are to pay for another electricity pipe into the house and have them bonded together, or to pay thousands of pounds for a custom one-off installation.

You have electricity, end of. Shut your moaning. If you want decent electricity, go live in the narrow strip of land nearest to the sub-station.

Do you see where I'm going with this

How far would we have got, as a country, with that approach?

It may come as a surprise to you, but this is pretty much exactly what happened to electricity as it went from its initial public generation (in the 1880s, with private companies) through to the concept of being a "utility".

The UK electricity market was, at first and of course, fragmented. It had city-based generating plant, with a variety of voltages, frequencies and currents. Because each city was supplied independently, there were frequent overloads and breaksdowns (yes, turning on too many lights would blackout the entire city).

Distance certainly *was* an important factor. At the outset, no-one knew what voltage was best, or whether to supply AC or DC. There was no concept of a national standard, and certainly nothing that could distribute electricity over long distances without losses.

In the time between the 1880s and the 1930s, if you wanted better lighting, then the answer was indeed to choose carefully where you lived, or to be very rich.

It was only in 1925 that agreement was reached on having the high-voltage national grid, that has subsequently come to give us a stable supply. It then took until 1933 for the regional cores of the grid to be constructed, and 1938 for those to be connected together to form one national grid.

It is this grid, and the network of substations feed off it, that gets you away from local dependencies, and lets you start to think of an electricity supply as a ubiquitous, dependable, utility. (Actually, I think it was the creation of all the labour-saving devices - cooking, washing, drying - in the 50's and 60's that turned electricity from being a novel thing in itself, into the ubiquitous enabler of all those tools)

What happened in the UK? The first public generation of power was in 1881. By 1931, 50 years later, 35% of houses had electricity (and most concentrated on just lighting at the time). By 1938 this was 65%, and 85% in 1948.

Funny: A figure of "85%" is about the same as the Ofcom market 3 & market 2 areas we see today - the densely populated cities & towns. I wonder if that is a coincidence???

So stability of supply came about from 1933 onwards, with half the country being added to the supply up to 1948 - when labour's post-war nationalisation took place. In that time, the electricity generation continued to be by private companies, but the grid itself was established as a government body. Private companies with central regulation.

National roll-out of natural gas was even later than this (1970s-1980s), and isn't that still going on?

It seems that the rollout of broadband isn't so very different, after all. Just on a faster timescale - itself made easier (but self-limiting) because the national network of copper has already been rolled out over 100 years for a different service.

In every case, the early impetus comes purely from private companies. This continues through middle life, but central regulation coordinates expansion. Finally, regulation is added to compel supply to the uneconomic parts of the country - but only after there's a majority of the country that can fund it.

Ofcom is now setting price controls to limit the cost of broadband to the least economic exchanges (market 1), and the government will probably set a universal service obligation of 2mbps. From first service in 2000 with a maximum of 2Mbps, to USO where it is the minimum, in 12 years or so. And at about 10% of the price.

I'm not sure how nationalisation is actually going to help this go further.

In fact, I'm struggling to think what large infrastructure projects *have* come from nationalised industry. The only one I can readily think of is the road network.

Sources:
National Trust - a good read
Electricity in the North-East in the late 19th century.
Wikipedia on the National grid

That's one quality post.

I did mean it rhetorically, but this insight is superb. Thaank you.

I'm guessing that one of the differences is that here in the UK we only have two fairly major players rather than a collection of regional operators, with one being a monopoly in half the country. (Not quite true, I'm ignoring Rutland, Kijoma etc in this - not deliberately, but I still assert that the final third is mostly about urbans)

Another difference may be that we do not yet collectively understand (I mean the public at large) what "broadband" really means; not being able to use the fridge and the kettle at the same time isn't the same as not being able to download a movie in five minutes rather than three hours.

This point I did get to: what would happen if we regulated in such a way that required every operator to supply 4Mbps+ (comparison: must supply ~240v) - I'm guessing that rather than a step forwards, we'd simply see a quarter of the country's broadband turned off mostly because it's supplied by one infrastructure operator.

Today'a announcement by Fujitsu et al might well trump the nationalisation argument in one go. If it got going, I doubt they would stop at rurals.

I suspect that they do not mean real rural areas ie a few houses in the middle of no ware but outer uban ares small town etc although I suspect that some of the larger rural villeges will be enabled I suspect this is the ones they will deploy FTTC to, the rest look to be getting 1Gbs FTTH

The way they get the biggest bang for the buck as the americans would say is infilling and building out from the existing Virgin areas

Well this is great news I must say.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

The conclusion I repeatedly reach, with which not everyone agrees, is that the infrastructural side of broadband is too important to be left in the private sector.

I don't disagree with the concept - it's the implementation that I have problems with.

You are suggesting removing the inherent self-interest of private business. Fine. I can understand that logic.

But you are suggesting that we replace it with a government agency. I look around at the state this country is in and really struggle to understand how putting yet another service under their control could possibly be a good thing.

I would favour better regulation. Give Ofcom a good kicking and get them to start looking at quality rather than cost. Give private business the incentive to improve and it will do so. Right now the only incentive they have is to cut costs and hunker down.

Edited by Andrue (Thu 14-Apr-11 15:03:04)