50p levy vs property tax

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Read more! Here's a question for you to ponder on this Sunday evening....50p levy minus the property tax on homes passed....

If the property tax for NGA domestic and CATV (cable TV) is £7.50 per home passed (HP) per year, (let's leave aside the £250/Rkm for each fibre lit for the moment, though that figure makes my argument even more obvious), and the new proposed 50p levy will raise £6 per household per annum, then why not just waive the property tax to stimulate FTTH?

Never mind how much it will take to administer the fund and collect the levy, imagine if you (that's a rather royal 'we' when talking about this government!) just said, "No property tax on (rural) properties -business and domestic- passed, and connected, just get on with rolling out superfast broadband (in rural areas)."

Because rural needs to be first, and there is standard classification of rural and remote, it's not difficult to work out how to make that happen and encourage the FTTH players to be attracted to rural areas. Oh, better spell it out I guess....waive the property tax first on Significant Rural, Rural-50 and Rural-80 eg anywhere with a population less than 37000. Why? Because all the urban places are considered low hanging fruit to the telcos and there isn't really any issue about market failure there with NGA.

And if connecting rural homes and businesses promotes investment, (which there is plenty of evidence from other countries far in advance of us to prove it) and we can then watch the economic impact on rural areas (which will of course hence create jobs for consultants and quangos to gather the hard data and evidence that such is the case), then it will accelerate the roll-out of FTTH nationwide....and the government will coin it in from economic regeneration, innovation, new businesses, income tax etc.

See, tis easy this joined up thinking lark. And remember.... you heard it here first!

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Newgen new entrants profile: Rutland Telecom

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Read more! Rutland Telecom have hit the news recently with their projects in Rutland, UK's smallest county. As more and more communities endeavour to drag themselves into the 21st century comms world, we thought it would be interesting to see how this latest community project started...

Dr David Lewis is the driving force behind Rutland Telecom, and he left teaching (Biology) 8 years ago. During the dotcom boom, he established examboost, and then went on to work on a government scheme which went into schools to help teachers nervous about working with ICT amongst pupils who were far more IT savvy. This led to him being asked to help out two big schools whose networks were "in a mess".

His experience in teaching has undoubtedly given him the ability to communicate easily with customers and consumers, and being self-taught in all aspects of IT and telecoms means that, although he speaks the language, he understands how important it is not to burden nor confuse customers with all the jargon.

Although he claims to not to be a ruthless business person, he is certainly tenacious. When he started his own ICT support company, which offers help to homes and businesses, he began to receive increasing numbers of requests for assistance in improving broadband connections. This led him to ask questions about IPStream etc to improve broadband and then to investigate the idea of LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) - he discovered there was nothing to stop a 1 or 2 man band unbundling an exchange. Little did he realise this would lead to two years of hand to hand combat with Open Reach, who seemed utterly incapable of dealing with anybody other than the 5 major ISPS. One suspects OR may now have far more experience in this field, having dealt with Rutland Telecom, and it looks like they are going to need it as others seek to take control and connect their own communities!

So far, he and his colleague, Mark Melluish, who has worked within the telcoms industry extensively, have unbundled two local exchanges and are now due to go live in a matter of weeks with a sub-loop unbundling project in Lyddington. In addition, using 5.8Ghz wireless, they have managed to connect another village, taking residents from the 300kbps side of the digital chasm to 20Mbps.

He sees a positive future for the company, and says he is inundated with enquiries from around the country - not just communities, but also new build housing estates, whose developers were short-sighted enough to put in copper. (Just like Milton Keynes, then!)

The project in Lyddington is interesting, in that Rutland Telecom are the first operator in the UK to sub-loop unbundle and independently connect a community with FTTC. The plan is to work towards FTTH in the future, but of course the issue, as always, is raising the capex. However, David believes that this can come within the community, including local businesses, whilst waiting to see what occurs with the 50p line tax and the NGA Fund. With figures such as £200 per household, it is likely that solutions such as those being pioneered by Rutland may well be one of the stepping stones in the roadmap to the eNdGAme.

However, for those of us who always have to see a downside to everything that may prevent us achieving the eNdGAme of FTTH, the one concern here is that if communities seek to sup-loop unbundle without a financially sustainable model to upgrade to FTTH, they may be stuck with that solution far into the future when funds are diverted elsewhere to FTTH. Whilst FTTC is far better than what many are hindered with at present, it is by no means what is required to create a Digital Britain and should only be viewed as an interim step to the eNdGAme.

In the meantime, the more communities who take control of their next gen infrastructure, and own it on a mutual model, the better! Power to the people!

Have a good weekend.

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