Having discussed the reaction with those who were there and who were not, it is worth clarifying the position as regards the wider Final Third NGA picture.

It is helpful to consider NGA as a Digital Supply Chain, most simply as a two stage process:

1 – the Digital Village Pump that get a fat pipe into at least striking distance of each local community and ideally into its heart

2 – the First Mile Access Network that delivers the bits to and from every home and business.

The NextGenUs Community Interest Business Model is concerned with the latter stage and that is where Taxpayers Money is not necessarily required, given enough customer demand from the outset.

This is the area where the Big Society initiative, being pioneered for rural broadband in Cumbria, can help to realise that demand by grassroots action, awareness-raising and education so that communities can make some informed choices as to their 4th Utility Futures.

Recent news regarding our friends in Utopia simply confirms the economics of rural FttH

The former stage, the Digital Village Pump, is a different beast.

The biggest challenge and cause of individual project uncertainty is the distance based charging that hits rural areas hardest for Fat Pipe provision.

One solution worth considering is for Government/OFCOM to mandate that there is a single DVP price available everywhere across the Final Third.

As BT has by far and away the most comprehensive national footprint, and in rural areas is often the only commercial provider, then this mandate would fall upon BT, as a standard DVP product.

This sounds simple and appealing – the approach would level the Fat Pipe playing field for everyone – will it work commercially though?

No – Why?

As pointed out by a senior Exec on Friday, for BT to drop prices in rural areas as part of this levelling then it would have to increase prices in non Final Third Areas elsewhere to compensate for lost revenues (setting aside the fact that those revenues losses may be hypothetical as the current price points make those Fat Pipes non-viable to use at present).

The unavoidable problem for BT is that in those other markets, BT is competing with many other carriers and therefore cannot raise prices nas it will lose business – i.e. distance independent pricing for DVPs looks to be a self-defeating proposition – unless every carrier is regulated (or taxed) equally to remove the disparity, which in turn creates a vast new reel of red tape to bind up the market.

Hmm.

So what are the alternatives?

Public Sector Asset Building is the most interesting prospect – the reuse of infrastructure, prime examples being connectivity for schools and other public buildings, that is already delivering the bits into these areas of Final Third need.

NYNet is a helpful model as a guide to how this might be implemented, the drwaback with NYNet being that it does not actually own any network infrastructure, rather leases circuits from BT – this means that the prices charged are not dissimilar from what BT themselves would offer.

What is really required, and this is where Taxpayer Subsidy (with appropriate clawbacks to keep HM Treasury happy!) can play an important role, is for Public Sector to translate its current connectivity OPEX into CAPEX by building out the interconnects and making available the Digital Village Pump feeds.

A great example of how this can be delivered is the CLEO network in Lancashire and Cumbria, that supplies rural schools across two counties and also deliver the Digital Village Pumps to a number of pioneering Community networks including GAB and WENNET

From there onwards, each community can then elect to build its own infrastructure or employ the services of a wide range of different suppliers to do it for them.

So by focusing Taxpayer Intervention on the Digital Village Pump and letting communities and market decide and deliver the most appropriate First Mile delivery infrastructure, ultimately FttH and FiWi for starters, we move a step closer to building the 4th Utility that the UK requires to compete (and cooperate) globally.

According to the brass plaque above, the village of Ashby in Lincolnshire got its original Village Pump Utility back in 1887.

Now some 123 summers later, Ashby is getting its Digital Village Pump delivered.

What works in rural Lincolnshire can work across the country as a whole and the recent keynote speech by Jeremy Hunt MP, now the Secretary of State with responsibility for matters Notspot and Broadband, gives confidence that there is the political will to ensure the effective priming of these Digital Village Pumps, within the Austerity Imperative of ensuring best value for any penny of scarce Taxpayers Money employed.

There follows some thoughts and suggestions from the Final Third perspective as to the opportunities and pitfalls of delivering Digital Britain.

MediaKeynoteThoughts

Over at the NextGenUs blog, recent coverage of the subject by BBC Look North with a focus on Lincolnshire and Dig Your Own Fibre!

Some excellent coverage on several initiatives here by Chris Benfield at the Yorkshire Post and a couple of quotes:

“Hull-born Guy Jarvis came back from Australia in 2001 and could not believe that Brits within shouting
distance of towns had less broadband than some customers in the proper Outback.

His company – previously Fibrestream, now morphing into NextGenUs – follows a business model, enabled in 2006, called a community interest company, which means it must re-invest most of its profits for public benefit. It has just launched a
demonstration project giving the Humber Lifeboat station a full two-way connection, enabling it to stream film
of operations to other agencies, such as coastguard and media, as well as downloading at top speed to “the
remotest spot in England” – Spurn Point, at the end of the finger of sand which steers the Humber into the
North Sea.

When we first reported the project, it looked as if the answer was to squeeze more out of existing wires from
the BT exchange, at Easington. But that would not have been fast enough. Another possibility was to run new
fibre-optic cable over the five miles – but the cable itself costs £10 a metre and the cost of digging and ducting
can easily make that £110. A cheaper option was to wrap new cable around the old BT wires, strung on poles
between Easington and Spurn Point. But BT’s charging rules made even that too expensive.

Satellite connections are costly and cause signal delays which are awkward for some applications. The
eventual solution, at about £6,000, was a superfast 1,000 megs-per-sec cable up a tower block in the heart of
Hull, to a transmitter-receiver array exchanging radio signals of 100 mps capacity with Spurn Point, 22 miles
away, over a series of relays. Actual initial test speeds were 40mps “down” and 20 mps “up” and they can be
tweaked up. The lifeboat crew and another thousand customers in Hull and Holderness will get a similar
service for about £20 a month for typical household needs, on a pay-by-use basis. A lot of city customers pay
more for less.

Mr Jarvis says: “We call it fi-wi – a mixture of fibre-optics and wireless. And it is probably the future for
thousands of communities. My advice to anyone feeling left out is: talk to your neighbours. On your own, you
are not going to get anywhere.”

“… the retiring chief executive of North Yorkshire Council, John Marsden, saw a chance to showcase how the council’s NYNET services might be expanded. He fixed £25,000 of funding and Mr Jarvis’s company put in a similar investment to set up a wireless relay, to Newton and on to Stape, from a NYNET connection at Lady Lumley School in Pickering, 14 miles away. About 50 customers pay up to £50 month for up to 10 mps with low contention. On the basic service, they get an actual four to five mps for £20 a month plus VAT.”

Have a good listen to the following interview on BBC Radio ********

Lincsffth

Can you work out which local community in the Final Third is getting FttH this summer?

Thanks to Lindsey Annison’s pointer, here is an excellent blog post from Geoff Daily at App Rising on both the problem and solution for fixing fixed NGA for the UK

Well said Geoff! – you go right to the heart of both the UK NGA problem and point to a key part of the solution.

An option for SMART government intervention, maximum bank for buck, is to act as underwriter for that most local level of democracy and taxation, the Parish Council.

Parish Councils can levy precepts for the provision or upkeep of services in the common good.

A century ago, Parish Councils were instrumental in pioneering the provision of utility services we now take for granted e.g. piped water, electricity.

NGA is the 4th Utility, so it follows that there is a 21st Century role for the Parish Council Precept (PCP).

The challenge for local communities, across a patchwork of perhaps 15,000 localities spread across the UK in predominantly-rural areas, is how to make the significant CAPEX costs involved with FiWi deployment digestible for the local community.

By underwriting centrally, the Westminster Government could simply enable each Parish Council to spread this CAPEX over a decade or two, rather than a year or two.

County Councils are the obvious and natural choice as intermediaries in this process

- John Marsden, until recently Chief Executive of North Yorkshire County Council, acted to test the subsidiarity proposition that Parish Councils are best placed to determine (and also reinvigorated by) local solutions, which in turn resulted in the successful NextGenUs NandS NGA FiWi project in Newton & Stape in the North Yorkshire Moors.

The incoming Government, particularly Dr Vince Cable (BIS) and Mr Ed Vaisey (Broadband), has a golden opportunity here:

Combine this PCP funded approach with Government action in directing the £200M (perhaps still ring-fenced from the Digital Switchover fund?) available for the “2Mbps USC by 2012″ Digital Britain Report deliverable into making available Digital Village Pumps (Isenberg’s Dumb Fat Pipes) and achieving the Final Third First is now within reach.

The reality is that we are all consumers where the 4th Utility is concerned -

from the chairman of BT

to the grandparents wanting to keep in touch with family in New Zealand,

to the children anxious to avoid detention for not completing their homework online,

to the person with health problems wanting to live independently in their own home with the aid of advanced tele-healthcare

to Government Departments that want to cut the costs of transactions with the General Public.

The key message is that regardless of our day jobs, whether we are public or private or community sector minded, each and every one of us needs to get together and demand that the UK has a world-leading telecommunications infrastructure, the 4th Utility, to be proud of – AND PRONTO!

What is interesting is the spread of projects across the UK represented and the different stages that each group or company are at.

Aidan Paul, CEO Vtesse Networks, giving his inimitable perspective on business rates – 1601 poor relief act of Elizabeth I being where it all dates back…. with such delights as the Window Tax along the way

More to follow…

This project is a Nationally Important and Statistically Valid Next Generation Access FiWi Trial for up to 1000 Residential Subscribers.

Locations covered ranging from inner city like Great Thornton Street Estate in Hull to remote-rural like RNLI Humber, and the suburbs, Market Towns and Villages in between, covering the whole Humber sub-Region (Hull, East Riding, North and North East Lincolnshire)

Performance levels are World Leading initially at up to 100 Mbps both ways (symmetric) NGA, on a gigE bearer.

More details to follow in the New Year about how residents can apply to participate.

Merry Christmas and here’s to a pioneering NGA New Year for Hull & Humber residents.

First up, a 9 minute overview

Some early arrivals meet and greet – [20 Seconds]

More Convergence Conversations – [19 Seconds]

People Create Change – [25 Seconds]

NGA will be a Patchwork of diversely different and equally valid networks – [64 Seconds]

Funding Brickwall – [33 Seconds]

The Community Perspective – [153 Seconds]

Structural Separation of FttH Natural Monopoly – [239 Seconds]

Colloquium in Full Flow – [228 Seconds]

Great Thornton Street Estate Hull – a Case Study – [108 Seconds]

More videos to follow once uploads to Youtube completed – oh for symmetric NGA hey!

Full version of BSG COTS meeting courtesy Hull City Council here – [2 Hours]

A NextGenUs Open Source Consultancy Tool

Each technology has its own merits:

Fibre to the Home (FttH) provides future-proofed fixed access

Wireless provides mobility and temporary or nomadic access

Each technology can also provide mutual redundancy, so that if one fails the other can keep the service operating uninterrupted

For permanent, fixed installations, FttH is the preferred delivery technology and wireless best provides access over short distances from Fibre feedpoints