Is Cumbria JFDI Part 2?

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Read more! I feel I can better expand on the Broadband Industry Day last week after catching up with some thoughts of those who were there too this week.

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



There appears to be a mix of emotions surrounding not just that day and who was (and wasn't) present, but also the procurement process and progress in general.

There is one question which I feel needs to be asked over and over again until we get a reasonable answer: Why has Cumbria County Council chosen the short list for suppliers when the Council does not even seem remotely clear about what it requires and is therefore procuring?

The second question which follows that is: why are IT services included in the spend of a £16.8M pot destined to solve the rural broadband issue, not CCC's infrastructure problem?

It seems the second list is now down to four (CTC have dropped out because they were actually more interested in the IT services list, or so we hear) - BT, Cable & Wireless, Commendium and Fujitsu.

This is an eclectic mix to say the least. C&W, Fujitsu and Commendium all appear to be working on a telehealth experiment in Shap together. (About which it appears Shap know little to nothing). One could wonder if there are actually only two players left in that list? In which case, as CCC are still unclear precisely what is to be delivered, how on earth are Cumbrians to believe that these may be the best suppliers for the still-to-be-defined task? Particularly as there are other suppliers who fail to meet procurement criteria in multiple counties now who could deliver in a more agile and probably cost-effective manner, who seem far more interested in working with the communities.

My slightly more positive feel about BDUK and CCC on leaving in the pouring rain on Friday does not entirely appear to be reflected by others present. And having heard their concerns, I have to admit to beginning to feel as though we are on a roller coaster which may find itself running out of track before ere long. However, there is agreement that there are definitely some hearts in the right places, and support for community broadband. But there seems to be a growing feeling that process and bureaucracy may prove the undoing of the mere mortals/human beans that should be being served by the process rather than vice versa.

The suppliers seemed to have been a variety of - 'scared stiff', 'gobstruck' at the professionalism of the community presentations, as well as eager (or not, in some cases) to work with communities, as well as keen to work with other supplier partners (or not).

There is a concern I think that there will be a power struggle to ensure that the second list do actually deliver what Cumbrian communities need, now and in the future, and do not just pay lip service to what CCC and communities are saying purely to win the bid. This is extremely likely if CCC do not clearly define exactly what needs to be delivered and understand at least approximately what that may/should cost.

PhilT put this rather succinctly the other day when commenting about technology neutral bids when he said that what we should be doing is defining the gigabit connection and then allowing the suppliers to indicate precisely how they would deliver this. Rather than giving the suppliers enough rope to hang the entire county with which is what I think many are concerned that CCC may be doing, inadvertently or otherwise.

I did feel frustrated on Friday that there still seem to be too many on very steep learning curves, very late in the day, and that there simply is not enough collaboration and sharing of knowledge going on. To assume that all the knowledge is within the suppliers' camps is a disproven theory now, and actually it could be argued that some of the information that the communities now hold is far more commercially sensitive than that of some of the suppliers. Particularly those suppliers who are only in this for the money.

I think that as we are a Big Society area and were specifically given instructions by Nat Wei in Kirkby Stephen to kick down the barriers which prevent delivery of the right solutions for this fair land called Eden, that some of those barriers may be about to receive a serious kicking to remove them once and for all. And to be honest, not a moment too soon after the Project Access debacle.

It would also seem that some of the suppliers are treating this simply as a commercial process, which is fine, but in times of tight budgets, cuts etc, one would have hoped (in my little idealistic world) that perhaps the Council would work doubly hard to ensure that the money goes as far as possible. One community has reported that a supplier took away their shopping list to 'shave a few pounds off it' and came back with something that was almost double the original costings.

Which is standard public funding behaviour (think of a number, add a zero, times by pi) but in this day and age, and for community broadband for a county such as Cumbria which has such a high proportion of experienced fibre and broadband folk - that's not going to fly, is it, eh? Or one would hope that the Council would see through such behaviour and stamp on it.

I am beginning to wonder whether I am correct in believing that a growing number of folk are disenchanted with the entire procurement process and are actually planning to JFDI without the backing of the Council. Yes, it could prove inordinately difficult, but that depends on whether the rest of Cumbria understands what is going on and backs these communities. After all, it is not too difficult to vote out those who have been elected in the future if the actions of a few determined folk prove over time that the Council went about things the wrong way.

In reality, it only needs one reasonably sized community to work together with smaller suppliers, who could not even make those short lists, to JFDI, and a spotlight could be turned onto the winners of the bid to ensure they deliver above and beyond what 'hicks in the sticks' can. However, this would mean building a world-class network and not an interim solution; but it seems that there are at least two of the pilots that are already at the required level of knowledge and planning to carry that through. I suspect there are more who are not as vocal or as public who could also be a 'threat' to the Council's procurement over the coming 2-5 years.

And this, to me, is where things may well get interesting. If the communities act together to share information, skills, knowledge, best practice, we could see some best networks built on and in Cumbrian soil that surpass anything that the winner might choose to deploy given a commercial choice. And all of us will be far more interested reading a front page of the Herald that shows people we know, in places we know, digging where they live, than passing yet another BT van at the side of the road.

£16.8M is a drop in the ocean to some of the companies on that short list, but it could still turn dirty. It's not about that funding; it's about landgrab and having customers who may stick with the supplier for 20 or more years into the future. Trouble is, oh supplier friends of ours, this is a very tight-knit community and our jungle drums are far faster than any broadband you may care to install! Dirty tricks will be exposed in less time than you can dip a sheep, and will be shared via our traditional communications routes. And Cumbrians are vocal!

At a time when Cumbrians are struggling to make ends meet, wastage of what is viewed as OUR MONEY, paid from our TV licences, is likely to be taken badly. And if CCC act properly and there are penalty clauses for failure to deliver, this could become a costly exercise. But, let's not jump that dry stone wall before we get to it, eh?

Rory said he wanted to see spades in the ground before the end of this year. Or that's what I heard, but someone else thinks he said before the end of August. That being the case, we have come up with a pilot that could potentially do just that. And to me, that is one of the joys of rural living. Throw an idea into the communal pot, toss it around a little with your neighbours who are equally as passionate about Eden, work out the kinks and details, and then JFDI before moving on to the next project our communities need that no-one else can work out how to fund or action!

Watch this space....


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How to spend £530M (or not...)

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Read more! One of the reasons to keep going with broadband campaigning (despite my frequent attempts to retire from all this grief) must be the chance to meet and have access to people who you would otherwise never come into contact with, and benefit from their thinking. For everything else there is Mastercard, but for quality replies such as this....

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



This weekend, at 8.09am, (which indicates how much the CCC update bothered me!) I sent the following email to someone I met whilst kicking my heels in a bar during the Lisbon 2010 FTTH Council Conference. He looked English, we got talking, and it turned out that, coincidentally, he too was at the conference. We met again in Milan a few weeks ago.

He is MD of a company already supplying 25Mbps and upwards to businesses, and who is about to start connecting rural domestic properties to similar fibre and FiWi services, with or without BDUK.

Whilst he was happy for me to publish his name, I have chosen to anonymise the content of this email. He is not based in Cumbria, and as far as I know his company is not planning to put in even an EoI for the BDUK Cumbria projects. I asked his opinion as someone who is *not* involved in the personalities or politics of this region.

As ever, I make no apologies for my approach to getting problems into the open - blame my Yorkshire upbringing. A spade is a spade is a spade.

Morning

http://www.cumbria.gov.uk/broadband/update.asp


Before I give myself some sort of fatal apoplectic attack at the idiocy of our Council, would you care to make any comments on this from Cumbria County Council yesterday?

Thanks!
Lins

He replied:

From the horse's mouth:

“Our aim is to use these [Rural Market Testing Pilots] to discover exactly what needs to be done to make superfast broadband commercially viable in rural communities as well as urban areas, and to understand what kind of Government support will be necessary.”
Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, 15th July


The first step in understanding how government may invest in extending superfast broadband beyond where the private sector will get to will be the running of 4 market testing pilots in rural areas. The information from these projects, in addition to initiatives that are already going on across the country, will be used to better target possible government intervention and investment in ‘superfast broadband’ in the future.

The above is taken straight from the BDUK website.

Three phrases really stick out here: "market testing", "pilots", and "superfast". In my view these are the crucial elements of what the money should (one might even say "must") be used for.

Superfast

Clearly, there is no dictionary/legal definition of what constitutes superfast. However, I would argue that two, phased, meanings are emerging. The first, short term, measure is to get speeds above those theoretically possible with ADSL 2+ technology. A suitable goalpost for this in my view would be something north of 20 Mbps. For the medium term, then I agree with you that we need 100Mbps access, with a true symmetric capability.

Market testing

Market testing means, in my view, that the market must be tested! Put another way, then IF people do have access to superfast broadband at suitable price points (ie not expensive) then is there a good demand for it, what can it be used for, what will it be used for, etc etc.

Pilot

The BDUK website is VERY specific on this in my view - these are meant to be PILOT projects. They should be testing different solutions, different suppliers even.

So, returning now to the Cumbria "update".

First thing I notice is that the term "superfast" occurs only once in the whole update - in the first sentence as a descriptor for what the Accessible Cumbria project is all about. By the end of the update, the only speed mentioned has dropped to a miserly 2 Mbps. If that is what they think "superfast" means, then they should be sacked on the grounds of gross incompetence.

They then go on to state that "discussions with BDUK to date have focussed on two things", which they specify as:

• getting the best value for money
• ensuring any rationing is fair

Getting the best value for money should be measured against those three terms I listed above: Market Testing, Pilot, Superfast. That is what the money is clearly meant to be used for, and so that is what the successful use of that money should be measured against. Using the money for a different purpose should not be allowed and indeed if it is used for other purposes, then the County Council should be made to repay the money.

"Ensuring any rationing is fair" is a silly statement to make as it completely misses the point about what the money is meant to be used for. "Ensuring that the pilot addresses the challenges of delivering superfast broadband to all businesses and communities within Cumbria" would be a much better focus in my view.

The comment about FTTP is utterly ridiculous. Yes, it is expensive, but that is the point of BDUK money being focussed on "final third" areas where it is (supposedly) much harder to justify the investment. In any event, FTTP is only "expensive" where the cost per home passed is much higher than it is in dense, urban areas. Within a village, the homes might well be spaced as close as they are in an urban area and/or the cost of digging might well be less, thus helping to offset a higher home spacing.

The comment, "There are various degrees of enthusiasm and expertise in our communities which would also be shunned by the FTTP approach," is a very vague statement that is neither explained or justified. The person who wrote it is clearly not up to the task.

There then follows a long, rambling discussion about the provision of community points of presence. This serves only one purpose and that is to allow the council to spend the money on improving its own internal network with "spare capacity" perhaps being made available for community use. If they really think that the CLEO network, that they will have specified, could be leased to a supplier to then use for community access then they must have been smoking something. 

To fulfill the criteria of a superfast community point of presence (and for BDUK funding here, it must be superfast), means that the point of presence must be 1Gbps for any sizeable (eg hundred homes and upwards) community. The reason for this is that (assuming fibre delivery) the cost difference between a 100 Mbps and an 1Gbps feed will not be that significant, accepting that 100 Mbps wireless feeds would be ok for very small (few tens of homes perhaps) communities until a fibre path can be established/justified.

It really makes me fume that they think that they should install the CLEO network and then sub-let that to a supplier for community use as this is a classic way to waste money and opportunity. If anything, it should be the other way round - provide the funding that would have been spent anyway on the CLEO network to a supplier to help underpin its rollout of a true "superfast" backhaul network that is offered on an open access basis.

As for the concept of a "Quality Guild", well that just smacks of soviet style socialist thinking. It is also, I suspect, illegal under EU competition law.

Now moving on to the rationing bit...

I have to admit that the bullets do sound ok in and of themselves.

The concept of "broadband coordinators" sounds fine in theory. My real worry would be that it would be local loudmouths (aka "politician" types) who would grab these positions to further their own personal aims.

As with the [redacted] project, I see that the term "pilot" is being rapidly watered down as in "...for BDUK to make a statement about any intentions for Cumbria beyond the pilot phase...". These are meant to be pilot projects to see what works etc, not the pilot phase of a full rollout by the Council!! Megalomania or what?!?

Again, as with the [redacted] project, "action" is unlikely before summer 2012 - nearly two full years after the money was made available. That is little short of pathetic really.

Deploying 1 Gbps community points of presence to every village with (or close to) an existing BT exchange is pretty basic stuff. The costs of deployment are easy to suss out (Openreach EAD circuits have open pricing and the "excess construction" would not take that long for Openreach to assess). The County Council could have held a mini-tender just for the provision of these circuits very quickly and then have got them deployed within around a further six months. Whilst that was going on, the council could have been working on further, localised tenders for the "last mile" bits, combining a healthy mix of fibre and wireless (and even high speed satellite) deployment.

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[Note: Despite Ofcom's banning of all usage of the term "superfast broadband" without a TSR, I have permitted it this one last time on the 5tth blog. From now on, use superfast broadband within my hearing at your peril.]

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