Customer Owned Fibre

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Read more! Useful coverage at the Economist in this week's TQ section of how in Scandinavia and the USA customers for telecoms services are taking ownership of their individual First Mile fibres and sharing ownership of the next hop through a mutual ownership model.

Whether and to what extent this approach will work in the UK remains to be seen.

There are arguments that say the UK market is less attuned to the kind of mutual self-help ownership seen in rural America for example, and less alike the rural small scale mutual utilities seen in eg. Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.

Ultimately the value in the fibre is in its use and the First Mile is for each customer's use, so it seems sensible to match that usage with ownership
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The Spanish join the party

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Read more! The Spanish government have joined Finland in making a minimum speed of broadband a LEGAL RIGHT.

From 1st January 2011, every Spaniard will have the right to a minimum speed of 1Mbps, announced the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Commerce at the 3rd Digital Content International Conference. Finland's law takes effect from July 2010, and in 2015 will increase to 100Mbps as LAW.

Spain may have some difficulties implementing this new law because of the topology, and will undoubtedly have to resort to wireless in some of the most remote and mountainous regions. However, having seen a few FiWi projects in Cataluña, they have plenty of in-house expertise to do so. The announcement is backed by 100million euros of public money, which will then release a further 300million euros.

Once again, we are not leading the way in any sense, and are actually falling behind other European countries by removing the legal rights of our citizens in moving from USO to USC.
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Finland, Twitter, Dead Trees.

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Read more! It was interesting to watch this story break on twitter yesterday. Finland to get broadband as a legal right.
Many websites carried the story and tweeted the link throughout the day. It was actually 6 hours down the line before the journos got it on the newspaper sites, (presumably because they would have to check and verify) and a further day would pass before it appeared on dead trees. A month will pass before it appears in a magazine. The power of twitter, the power of the web, and another example of why everyone needs access to this utility, broadband and all its tools. Without reliable internet access how can a rural business keep up with competition? Many are still on dial up. Read more!