An insightful analysis of the NextGenUs NANDS Project over at Broadband Britain

A couple of paragraphs are particularly worth repeating below, as they capture perfectly the possibilities that open up for reciprocal and mutual benefit from sharing and reusing basic infrastructure to enable the economic deployment of Next Generation Access (NGA) networks in conventionally-considered to be marginal market segments e.g. rural.

The challenge for BT is to recognise and get comfortable with the notion that stepping back from owning the First Mile everywhere does make overall commercial sense, that by genuinely and effectively cooperating with Third Sector NGA operators like NextGenUs UK CIC there is a better way to eliminate the Digital Divide than pushing BET

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For a company which does not believe it can invest in Next Generation Networking in market 1 (rural) exchanges, without public support, it would seem appropriate to create a means to re-draw BT’s line of responsibility for NGA and NGN services. Newton and Stape and NextGenUS is providing a template.

The Newton and Stape relationship with Nynet provides a ready made template for simple interconnect to a single point of handover. As the radio network is replaced with fiber this ought to be covered by a reciprocal infrastructure sharing contract using BT duct and poles where they exist, in exchange for BT re-using the fibre or spare fibre tubes with a means to add its own radios should it wish too.

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