Yesterday’s BSG COTS Steering Group meeting made some excellent progress in terms of firming up the definition of what is inside and outside scope for the overall COTS programme.

Something that was apparent as regards NGA is that we can see emerging a bipolarity between open access infrastructure with clear separation between access and services on the one hand and closed access infrastructure on the other hand, whereby the NGA proposition is delivered in a monolithic vertically integrated fashion.

Examples of the latter include satellite delivery eg. Avanti, mobile broadband via 3G and cable eg. Virgin Media in on-net areas.

An interesting question to pose is whether there is any particular technical reason why consumers should be obliged to take ISP services from their access provider at all.

Or put another way, why should consumers not be able to select their preferred ISP using cable, 3G or satellite connectivity as a dumb fat pipe, in the same way as is available for copper-based xDSL service today and via the work of COTS and NICC will be consistently available for ALA in the NGA near-term?

Certainly there are commercial and to some degree historical conventions at play here, however, fundamentally there seems to be no reason why, in a truly technology-neutral sense, consumers should have to take any further applications or content service from their baseline access connectivity provider.

The issue is important to consider in the context of possible public funding particularly for so-called White Areas aka NotSpots which are mostly found in the First Third of the UK, those mainly rural areas that are presently so poorly served for broadband and where arguably the need for reliable and capable connectivity exceeds that of urban areas.

If the consumer is to be assured of the maximum choice and best value proposition from NGA, regardless of where they live and by whatever means their connectivity is delivered then Open Access is surely a must.