Broadband Britain bill
'The bill looms for Broadband Britain', article by Richard Wray in The Guardian today makes for interesting reading. He questions when, and who will turn attention to broadband infrastructure to ensure UK can compete in increasingly broadband world.
Wray, like Ofcom is asking whether UK should dump neglected copper lines and if so, who will pay for it?
Can we compete with BT's Openreach in the equation, or is that one broken promise too far, as suggested by John Pluthero, head of Cable & Wireless Europe, Asisa and US who says, 'The telecoms strategic review wasall about relinquising powers in return for specific measureable undertakings from BT. Given the number of times BT has breached its undertakings, why would anyone believe that anything has changed?
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Posted 25 Sep 2007
Last edited 25 Sep 2007
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1. At 25 Sep 2007 14:41, Philip Sheldrake wrote:
I was discussing this infrastructural problem with Antony Walker, CEO of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, just two weeks ago. It seems this is just the kind of problem that's not best served by an open market as no-one can afford to invest in the infrastructure without guaranteed customers. And no-one can get the customers if the infrastructure doesn't exist because there's no services running over it to sell.
Classic chicken and egg. You might say that the mobile infrastructure had similar problems, and came in around the £20bn mark too, but most of that had to be written-down subsequently, which doesn't inspire confidence.
The only thing we could think of (actually, I shouldn't attribute Antony's good name to such a hairbrain idea) was to sell consumers a vision of the future with fibre to the kerb, or fibre to the home, and get them to pledge to become customers, and potentially shareholders in such an endeavour. With sufficient pledges, ooh, I don't know, say from 20% of the population, a private company or public-private enterprise might bite the bullet.
Mmmmm? Anyone fancy taking on the marketing communications job?