Blog Layout

The Rural Forgotten - Broadband Woe

Matt Wiles • May 02, 2019

Year after year, we hear government proclamations that access to the internet is so important to families and the economy. Year after year we hear about how speeds are improving and that ‘fibre’ is our digital future. We hear about £billions of state aid being spent to improve broadband across the country.

The United Nations is actively considering making broadband a human right in international law. Back in 2015 David “Referendum” Cameron even promised everyone in the UK will have access to ‘decent broadband’ by the end of 2020. On a side track, just to be clear, let’s look at what the UK Government and Ofcom thinks ‘decent broadband’ looks like. According to Ofcom, this is “For the USO, Government has defined decent broadband as a service that can provide a download speed of 10 Mbit/s, and an upload speed of 1 Mbit/s upload. There are other technical features that ensure a quality service.” (source: Ofcom Broadband USO page, 05 December 2018). I will cover the usefulness of the Government USO separately. Yet somehow, our rural villages, farms, business areas and hamlets don’t seem to be reaping the benefits of this expenditure or these promises.

BT, Ofcom, the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DDCMS) happily accept the out-of-date analysis performed by out-of-touch analysts such as Ovum or Analysys Mason that it costs many times more to connect a property in a remote location than in an urban spot. This of course is true. However, the accepted approach to resolve this just makes it worse for citizens and better for BT.

What’s wrong with the funding method?

The Government has worked on a strategy that flatters the statistics and does not address the problem. It also ignores market forces and changes in technology which reduce the costs of installing super high-performance broadband.

The problem works like this:

1. We want 99% coverage. Okay, sounds fair so far.

2. We have limited money and understanding on how to fix it. Okay, yep, both true, but keep quiet about the lack of understanding bit.

3. Let’s ask the market what postcodes they already have superfast internet and make the problem look smaller. Hmm, starting to get a bit flaky now.

4. Let’s go to tender around the UK and tell operators that they will win if they make our statistics look good. Oh, dear, this might not end well.

a. For example

i. You’ll get paid for ‘passing’ a property; it doesn’t matter if you actually connect it.

ii. The winner of the tenders will be the one who promises to ‘pass’ the most premises, so focus on the easiest, most densely populates areas, even if they are actually commercially viable without subsidy.

iii. Don’t worry too much about the quality of the broadband, the spec that’s on BT’s easy to achieve spec-sheet will do.

5. Call everything ‘Fibre’ something, because that sounds good and don’t worry if it’s still mostly copper because the British public will believe anything. Right, that’s it, the marketeers have started to take over.

The outcome (so far). Well, of course, £2.1 billion has been spent with the following effects:

1. All the easy properties have been passed. Unsurprisingly, these are in towns, cities and larger villages.

2. Operators have exaggerated their coverage claims, as the feeble copper-based ‘fibre to the cabinet’ doesn’t work as well as promised.

3. Early schemes were postcode-based. The problem is that postcode areas in rural settings tend to be quite large, so properties were crossed off the list when they shouldn’t.

4. Because all the easy stuff has been done without any consideration whatsoever for the harder ones, there are now literally thousands and thousands of islands or pockets that have been left behind. This is our rural woe, as these pockets are too small to be of any commercial interest to any large operator such as BT or Virgin etc.

In 2018, someone at the Ministry finally realised that this isn’t working and started scratching for ideas on how to fix it. “We need to look at this differently, turn it on its head, turn it inside out”. Genius! “Let’s call in Outside In!. Nobody will know what it means, but while Brexit’s going on, we can still look like we’re doing something”. And so here we are in 2019, wondering what Outside In means and whether it will make a difference. Of course, all the time, some organisations have been making a difference. Private fibre optic outfits like Truespeed and B4RN have just got on with it. Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs), like Boundless, Quickline, Wildanet and Bordelink just carried on doing their thing. Not only that, whilst Government schemes have aimed for 30 Mbps speeds, the independents rarely start that low, with most delivering speeds from 100 to 1,000 Mbps!

Despite having had to navigate around vague coverage plans from the ‘formal’, funded schemes and not having the huge marketing spend of BT, these independent rural operators have been quietly connecting properties by the thousand. That’s the right scale to fix rural problems. Locally, with agile operators who actually care.

Ladies and Gentlemen, here is your Outside In! Here is the solution for our Rural Forgotten!

< Older Post Newer Post >