Following the announcement of the Final Third First Campaign last week, there have been many conversations about what FTFC is about, who are founders, who are observers.
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 [...]
NGA
We Are All Consumers
BSG-VOA Fibre Rates Workshop
All aboard for the joys of hereditament courtesy Alan Bradford VOA
All that is is a unit af rateing assessment, RV is the annual value of the hereditament
Valuation date – 2 years before a list goes live – 1 April 2008 for 1 April 2010 list
Rateable Occupier – seems to be the problem area [...]
Fair Shares and Funding
Copied below, with appropriate approvals, is a recent BIS email to a rural UK Community ISP.
Worthy of note is the reference to BT ducting being blocked at some point for every one of the 31 route examples quoted!
A better way to assess the true situation re actual BT duct spare capacity availability is to perform [...]
Next Gen Xmas News
FibreStream is pleased to draw attention to the NextGenUs NGA Test-Bed going live in the New Year, also in association with Kingston Communications, part of the KCOM PLC group
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 [...]
Cook Report Gets It
NextGenUs UK CIC is the UK’s pioneering and leading Next Generation Access (NGA) Community Interest Company, designed over a two year period to ensure that the interests of commerce are harnessed to put people first where the 4th Utility is concerned.
Gordon Cook’s December Report captures the issue stateside exceptionally well, here is an extract that [...]
BT Pole Dancing
Attached are a set of seven pages of a guidance document received by a Community network several months ago.
The subject matter is how independent community networks might go about sharing existing BT infrastructure like telegraph poles in rural areas and comments are welcomed here regarding how feasible such a contract might be in practice, from [...]
TeleTimms Tax
In a stunning act of double regression, as The Times reported today “£6 broadband levy may be trebled for homes with multiple lines“, it appears that not only are ministers seeking to tax telephone lines, there is a double taxation hit being lined up in the form of VAT on top of the £6 tax.
It [...]
Cost Plus – Return of the Engineers
Had a very interesting meeting today with some household name hardcore engineers, on the subject of NGA projects around the UK and likely projects worth considering for seed capitalising to create Community Interest PoWC (Proof of Working Concept) NGA deployments, over the next 3-6 months.
The purpose of PoWC projects are simple enough – as communities, [...]
FibreCamp’09
Here is some interesting footage that attempts to capture in 6 minutes a flavour of the first day of NextGen’09 in Leeds on 16th November, with a particular focus on the FibreCamp arranged by Brian Condon, Daniel Heery and Steve Spillane.
What is worth noting is the rising tide of interest in and support from Public [...]
NGA – the Open Closed Contest
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 [...]