New Local Government service – FTTH?

Recent developments in Dundee and Bournemouth have suggested that soon you will be able to source your 100 Mbps FTTH along with rubbish collections.  Bournemouth Borough Council is using technology from i3 Group Ltd (formerly H20networks) to build out their new Ethernet speed network throughout the district.  What started as a project to deliver a new network to interconnect all their 5,000 staff is rapidly growing to a plan to deliver FTTH to 88,000 of the Borough’s households.

Bob Rhodes, IT Project Manager, Bournemouth Borough Council comments: “In partnership with H20 Networks we are making tremendous cost savings, meaning that we can put Council Tax payers’ money to better use”.  One of those better uses seems to be to deliver FTTH capability to the all homes and businesses within the Bournemouth Borough Boundary.  The residents of Bournemouth have been receiving letters asking them to grant permission for a free connection.  i3 Group are using Bournemouth's network of underground sewers to deploy its fibre optic cabling.  The entire project will cost in the region of £30m and ultimately connect 88,000 homes and is to be designated as the first Fibrecity.

The Fibrecity project of i3 Group officially connected the first 50 homes in Bournemouth to its next generation network FTTH broadband network, with speeds of up to 100 Mbps. The group is now known to be targeting a nationwide rollout figure of 2,000 homes per week and more once additional fibre cities come on tap. Bournemouth is the first of 15 town and city-wide fibre networks being built across the UK by Fibrecity over the next 10 years.  Work has also started in Dundee to reach 55,000 homes. 

This true FTTH infrastructure sees two fibres installed to each property that connects to the Fibrecity network using underground sewers, which is cheaper than digging up the road to lay new cable. One fibre enables homeowners to benefit from paid for services such as IPTV, telephony and super fast 100 Mbps broadband connectivity. A separate 40 Mbps fibre is dedicated to the council and will be used to deliver local services such as community TV and health services.

Cable broadband provider Virgin Media recently launched a 50Mbps broadband service which, while not a true FTTH deployment, is currently the fastest consumer broadband service in the UK. Virgin aims to have the service available to all its customers by the end of this summer. Meanwhile telco BT has also unveiled fibre-based plans, announcing a £1.5bn investment to bring fibre to 10 million UK homes by 2012.  Neither of these two initiatives will offer the fully duplex services that FTTH can deliver.

The creation of these Fibrecity projects is an extremely interesting development of it may lead to the first direct local authority delivered network to be established since Kingston Telecom remained independent of the GPO National Telephone service when the rest of the country’s telephone exchanges where rolled into the forerunner of BT back in 1914.

The entry of Local Authorities into the ISP business could significantly accelerate the access of the public to the new super fast FTTH services. Equally it could lead to the increased “politicalisation” of service provision and control.  Either way it is an exciting development.  With the UK not even in the top 100 countries with these super fast services of FTTH and FTTB, the Fibrecity initiative is a welcome step in the right direction.

Fibre Taxation slowing the UK's broadband future.

The Government is in danger of creating a digital divide by discouraging investment in superfast connectivity unless it reviews the issue of fibre taxation. Despite Government backing next generation Internet applications and the use of fibre optic cable, it has continued to tax the rateable value of the basic infrastructure.

Elfed Thomas, CEO and founder of i3 Group, is calling on the Government to review the issue of fibre taxation ahead of the Digital Britain report expected later this month. He fears the imposition of the tax will create a digital divide between those companies able to afford the rate, and so benefit from superfast connectivity and those unable to offset the tax and thereby relying on the traditional copper networks.

He said: "Now is not the time for the Government to impose this tax. Fibre taxation is an issue which has been around for almost a decade but never before has it been such a potentially hot topic. Its resurgence comes as the Government is expected to back recommendations for the national deployment of dark fibre - to meet the requirement for universal Internet access to at least 2Mbps broadband speeds by 2012 in the Digital Britain report.

Given the Governments expressed commitment to ensure that the entire population has access to a less than ambitious 2Mbs, this is tax is clearly out of step with this aim.  It seems that the Treasury is still unaware of what is meant by “joined-up Government”.  With one branch of Government committed to improving Internet access for all whilst the Treasury tie the hands of industry behind its back by demanding an income from the means to deliver it!

Japan, Singapore, China, Sweden, Denmark and even Italy are rather more enlightened than the UK Government’s piece meal approach.  As I wrote last November in “When will the next generation broadband start to deliver for the UK”, our Government’s current approach and that of BT lacks the vision to deliver genuine advantage for UK plc in this crucial infrastructure.  Gordon Brown needs to get Lord Mandelson and Alastair Darling talking about something other than bonuses for failure in our Banks.

Further information @ H2O Networks site.