The True Cost of Britain's Copper Infrastructure II

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Further to the previous post about the cost in lives as well as a wastage of £billions within the utility, transport and communications infrastructure sectors, there are yet further costs of the continuing existence of this copper to point out e.g. the effect on the mobile industry and every sector which uses that.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



Ebay have just commissioned a report by Verdict Research about the poverty of mobile coverage in the UK and hence its impact on m-commerce. Whilst we talk about spectrum frequently, one subject which requires far more coverage is the backhaul to mobile masts, especially in rural areas.

This backhaul is frequently supplied by costly and lengthy copper wires. As any business will tell you, overheads such as this can be a killer which seriously affects the bottom line of any business. Yes, the mobile operators make healthy profits, especially from very low cost and profitable services such as SMS, but high overheads do affect the appetite for investment, particularly in such a competitive environment as the mobile industry where there are far too many loss-leaders, mainly in order to prevent too much churn to competitors.

Ebay's research about m-commerce is telling, especially when you consider that in most cases, m-commerce requires solid access to data services in order to function properly.

The totaltele.com article summarising Ebay's research begins with this paragraph:

eBay on Friday warned that patchy mobile network coverage, slow connection speeds and poor reliability is costing the U.K. economy £1.29 billion per year in lost sales.

The article goes on to say:

"M-commerce sales are already worth some £1.35bn to the UK economy, and are set to grow fourteen-fold over the next ten years to £19.26 billion by 2021," said eBay. "It is therefore essential for Ofcom to seriously consider the interests of m-commerce when considering what regulatory approach to take towards mobile broadband provision."

It is time for Ofcom and the government to consider not just the availability of spectrum but also the associated middle mile costs that fall to the mobile operators. And AFAIK, the vast majority of wired mobile backhaul and longhaul comes from BT and is copper-based. (Correct me, anyone?)

What these statements from Ebay would appear to imply is that we are losing around half of the potential income EACH YEAR because of the poverty of the network.

Start adding together the costs from the previous article and this one, and we are getting into per annum revenue figures that make the total costs of ubiquitous FTTH deployment seem more than just affordable. FTTH starts to seem imperative for long-term savings and to assist an economic turnaround.

And we haven't started on public sector savings yet, or added in the savings to each household of true broadband access. Or the environmental savings which can be achieved by replacing costly, energy-hungry, and aged equipment required to run a copper network with modern, energy efficient, fibre kit.

I am undoubtedly getting myself into hot water with posts which protest the case, such as this, particularly amongst those for whom there is still an addiction to copper, but it all has to be said. Over and over again until the message gets across that we must do something, and we must start to JFDI now.

There is an article by Caitlin Moran entitled, "Protesters? They're beautiful!" in which she points out that protesters are not required to have answers, they are there to stand as a question mark asking, "What are you going to do about this?"

This is one such online protest, with a big fat question mark, to our policy makers, telcos, public sector, decision makers, purse holders, communities, citizens and businesses asking that very question.






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No motion in the House

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Read more! Did the debate in the House move anything any further forward? Was it a discussion of, as @yarwell put it, apocryphal problems about broadband? Or was it a route to a solution for this country to have the (cough, splutter) 'best broadband network by 20xx'? To me, it was simply GroundHog day.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com


IMHO, for starters the Motion was wrong. Rory Stewart is my MP - I queried the wording and purpose of the motion prior to the debate. (Possibly not quite that diplomatically as I recall, but when your MP hits you with an autoresponder each time you email, and has failed to personally answer a single email I have sent as his constitutent since his election...well.....it gets irksome after a year.)

Once again, we hit the vagaries and niceties of the democracy we live in. Apparently, you dumb it down to get some support, or face the matter head on to actually solve it and risk outright Government opposition - to their own back bencher. Nice.

So, what we end up with is pretty much a nothingness. A debate on the telly box, a fill-in after lunch and until St Stephens empties out after rush hour, a few lines of media coverage, some MPs telling ghoulish tales about their constituents' failure to get online, but a hard-hitting outline of the problem? Nope. Some pussy footing around My Rt Hon friend's fantastic response, but no querying of facts, no accurate facts - that bloody £28BN figure was once again cited as fact when it wasn't and isn't. No hard core debate that actually sees people taking chunks out of each other on the floor and making the difficult choices that need to be made to push for a singular view of the place Britain is trying to get to and the route to it.

No, it was all rather pleasant, dull and pointless.

Chi from Newcastle quite clearly illustrated why Ofcom need taking out at the knees. She did no better at Rheged. She may well be a nuclearatonic brainiac rocketific psychotherapneumanist, but she seems to bluff her way out of every question with little actual knowledge or comprehension of the science, regulatory or economic arguments. I may be wrong but as yet she is doing indubitably well in proving me right.

There were several MPs who appeared to have been 'got to' by BT or some similar cause eg Ian Lucas, whose ponderous tones defied any of us to feel any passion for the subject whatsoever. He certainly didn't. And his facts simply were not. He definitely shouldn't sing for his supper - it'd be bread and water. The man seemed to understand nowt. (Or whatever the the equivalent of 'nowt' is on the Welsh border)

Eric Ollerenshaw took the floor and showed quite magnificently that he had actually heard a voice from grassroots. @cyberdoyle (who has listened hard to many over the years) had managed to inject Eric with the passion you will hear from so many consumers, communities, new entrants, businesses etc who GET IT. Now, Lancashire County Council, dare you ignore Hansard? It will be oh so easy now to highlight and broadcast, within moments, your decisions about that RDPE funding, Barry Forde's plan etc.

Tim Farron might have been lying on the bed of nails, the number he managed to hit. Quite astounding to actually hear informed truths come out of a politicians' mouth about copper, FTTC, and more. I've always been quite open to his views since meeting him when we were trying to fibre-wireless Garsdale many years ago, (kyboshed by the NWDA in favour of an impoverished and expensive wireless connection that can't, won't and doesn't work for many of its connectees); Tim definitely went up in my esteem today.

It is a true shame that the speakers cannot be intervened upon in such debates by the real world in real time. We've done it in our broadband and community events since 2004. A backchannel where the electorate are feeding information to our elected representatives might just put debates back on track and actually face up to the issues they are supposed to be discussing.

Or should we run such debates in the open, in the Big Society, and demand that our politicians attend by issuing invitations that bear similar gravitas to Question Time? Oh, but that also fails to tackle single issues debates..... If this, as it currently runs, is democracy which finds routes to the best solutions for this country, I will eat cat5.

(Due to the fact I have just sent an email to my constituency MP that includes F*&^ in the subject line, I will hold on further commentary until my MP responds to my real concerns about today's debate).



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The digital divide may widen and deepen yet

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Read more! This blog post puts it as succinctly as anyone can and contains the relevant links to expand further on the post from two days ago.

The worrying part in all this is several steps back from next gen FTTH. If the USO were to be removed, rather than a USO for minimum level broadband introduced as per EU regulator thinking, then all those who I and others know who still do not have a landline under that USO are going to be joined by many, many others who have little to no choice of mobile coverage, let alone a chance of decent broadband this decade or possibly the next. Who is this going to affect most? Yep, you've guessed it - the rural and the poor.

How long would it be before non-functioning landlines in rural areas, which will no longer fall under a USO, are not repaired? Our telephone box in the village has now been broken for several weeks. Many of the people here, where the average wage is £16000 (half the national average) rely on that phone box. Only 2 days ago, my door was hammered on by a neighbour up the village who does not have and cannot afford a mobile phone as she needed to phone the fire brigade. However, even if she had a mobile phone, her choice of providers is restricted to two or three max - and you end up choosing around here by where you are likely to need to make a call from as coverage is patchy to say the least.

There are no 3G dongles in this village. What is the point? They won't work here. When I was in Scotland last September I was stunned by how often there was no mobile signal, not even to text, let alone to try to surf on my smart phone. But it really isn't much different in much of the north of England.

This latest thinking shows how we are heading backwards. Brown can make glib comments about Tennessee Valley type thinking, but someone had better start advising him and others fast on the reality of what is required. And the implications of what some of their thinking is most likely to lead to. Instead of a mutually owned FTTH network that is future-proofed well into the middle of this century, we stand to waste phenomenal amounts of tax payers' money creating a patchwork quilt of un-coordinated solutions belonging to a multiplicity of providers who are there purely to serve their own commercial interests, not UK plc and its citizens.

By removing the USO, rather than future-proofing it to a broadband level USO, we stand to turn the digital divide into a chasm, with huge insurmountable cliffs at each side of it. The assumption that by throwing money at providers they will attack the problem in a co-ordinated and sensible manner that will help this country out is ludicrous.

We should adopt the approach the Scottish Highlands and Islands did over mobile coverage, which was to sit the mobile operators down and say, "You need to provide coverage to here, here and here. If you want to join in the game, you must share masts, and this is where the masts will be sited. If you don't want to play, then count yourself out of the running now and leave the discussions." (Or words to that effect). This brought choice of provider for the consumers, a minimum amount of infrastructure with shared costs thereby meaning it cost each provider less in the long run to reach a new market, and less environmental impact and planning problems from masts dotted willy nilly across the horizon.

Do our politicos in London have any idea how widespread zero or very poor mobile coverage is in this country? Do they have any idea how many people still do not have a fully functional landline under the USO? Do we really want yet more masts littering our countryside to provide fill-in? Have any of the mobile operators or telcos actually been made to prove their broadband speeds with actual users? Or prove that the mobile and 3G coverage is where they claim it to be?

Does this government and its advisors (who seem to have an in-depth comprehension of telecoms, not) know how to reduce the costs of the civils to ensure that any money thrown at the solution of the next generation FTTH problem creates jobs now and into the future, rather than being wasted on bureaucracy etc? Have they considered where the advice is coming from about the costs and methods to do this FTTH job - the industry body and its members for crying out loud, hardly independent is it?? Have they considered different forms of ownership eg owned by the users on a mutual basis, rather than constantly pursuing the myth/fallacy that by encouraging the competitive marketplace to deliver, this country's citizens are being best served? It must be easy to see from the growing outcry on public forums, the BBC website, current affairs programs, research, consumer bodies and so on that IT IS NOT WORKING.

When is someone seriously going to query £51/month and similar prices for a connection over an infrastructure with reduced opex costs and reduced environmental impact at a time when data transfer costs are also now actually approaching zero?

The telco tail is wagging the UK dog and it is time it stopped before we waste our money on a solution that isn't, and which many, many informed people could resolve if they were only asked, and then listened to.

Ah, it's nice to be back! < / rant> Your turn!!
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