[The first of two articles from different countries, on the same
subject - who is going to pay for the construction of a fibre-based
national network? Neither the UK or Australia have a plan, and
there's plenty of grumbling from the trenches. In Australia, the
opposition party, heading into an election, have proposed a
publically-owned network. Perhaps the UK's opposition parties, also
heading into an election, could consider the same. I didn't say
publically operated. I'd imagine a corporation majority-owned by the
public. This was the model Telstra started to adopt - and then they
got in that maniac American and everything went pear-shaped. More on
the Australian proposal:
BT Wholesale's director of product management, Angus Flett, has
claimed that consumers don't want faster broadband services and that
they won´t deliver it:
The firm, which announced record profits last month, is maintaining
its party line on fibre to the home, that it is a "UK PLC issue",
rather than a matter for the national telecoms network owner alone.
Instead, it will push broadband as an "application driven" service,
which it reckons will help it compete with rivals who have unbundled
the local loop (LLU) in exchanges to give them cheaper access.
Angus Flett, BT Wholesale's director of product management, said: "I
think the speed wars didn't provide value for customers...[they]
don't give two hoots about speed."
Critics have charged that BT is under-investing compared to telcos in
South Korea and on the continent, who are rolling out fibre optics to
the home, offering up to 100Mbit/s access. BT denies the claims, but
has published no plans to offer beyond 24Mbit/s ADSL2+ over its new
21CN backbone. Flett said: "If you do VDSL2 [a technology which
offers up to 100Mbit/s without upgrading the 'last mile' copper
wire], then you have to do fibre to the cabinet, and if you do that
then the economics mean you might as well do fibre to the home."
Flett's comments are obviously designed to play down the fact that
they're not putting much effort into broadband beyond ADSL2+ or
VDSL2. On the other hand there's not a lot of point in building
100Mbps networks if bandwidth can't keep up and consumers only ever
connect with a far lower speed.
Likewise other countries, such as South Korea, have largely built
their modern networks through vast public funding, something that is
rather difficult to do in the EU. People may point to Sweden, but
some of those we know on allegedly 100Mbps products barely receive
2Mbps.
Never the less, future broadband services shouldn´t be sidelined as
at the very least they reference a serious need to improve broadband
speeds for everybody, not just those living closest to the exchange.
As a country we can not afford to fall behind.
