Lords Report Urges U.K. to Stop Obsessing Over Speeds and Treat Broadband as Key National Asset

There’s a very real risk that despite the revolution in communications, some people and businesses are being left behind, the committee said. The U.K. government has made enhanced broadband provision a key public policy priority, and is making some progress, it said. But panel members said the work is proceeding “from a flawed prospectus” that lacks “an all-encompassing vision of pervasive broadband connectivity as a key component of national infrastructure."

Government policy “has become preoccupied with the delivery of certain speeds to consumers,” the report said. Lawmakers proposed an alternative strategy that calls for a national broadband network that’s considered a fundamental strategic asset, and which allows people to connect in different ways according to their needs and demands. The guiding principle shouldn’t be achieving certain speeds, but a long-term assurance that as new Internet applications emerge, everyone will be able to take advantage of them, it said. “Access to the internet should be seen as a domestic essential and regarded as a key utility."

Lawmakers urged the government to focus on fiber cable, and to deploy it as close as possible to end-users. Access must be open from the cabinet to the exchange, and there must also be open access to links between the exchanges that feed the cabinets, and to the high-level links into national and global networks, they said. The report defines the fiber hub as a physical object situated near a community that serves as a way station between that community and the broadband infrastructure that spreads across the rest of the country. Running into the hub from the wider network would be many open-access fiber cables, which would start out “dark” and then fill up with access networks run by local communities, small or mid-size businesses or infrastructure providers.

Panel members endorsed the government pledge of a universal service commitment, saying a clear political aspiration to provide universal broadband access to a minimum level is better at this stage than mandating a universal service obligation (USO). However, the report said, many ISPs think the strongest driver of consumers from basic to enhanced broadband will be IPTV services. If IPTV services become more widespread, the case for transferring carriage of broadcast content, including public service broadcasting, from spectrum to the Internet “will become overwhelming,” the report said. That may be a more sensible arrangement because spectrum is perfectly suited to mobile applications, it said. It urged officials, the Office of Communications and industry to start thinking about the desirability of such a transfer. If it occurs, and public service broadcasting channels begin to be delivered mainly online, the case for a USO “will become, in our view, significantly stronger,” it said.

The report called for several regulatory changes. One crucial step will be to create a set of open, industry-led standards for the physical network and the administrative interface between infrastructure and service providers, it said. ISPs in the current broadband market “face overwhelming disincentives” to offer services over fragmented and isolated access networks, it said. Ofcom should encourage, if not require, adoption of such standards, it said. It also asked the regulator to consider requiring infrastructure owners to provide open access to dark fiber at the cabinet level, and active and passive access, with rights to install and collocate active equipment, on relevant links at the exchange level and other nodes.

The government considered several models for delivering superfast and universal broadband and believes that “working with the private sector and local authorities is the best and most cost-effective approach,” said a spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. “We remain on track to deliver our broadband commitments.” The market will deliver superfast broadband to two-thirds of households, with BT investing £2.5 billion ($3.9 billion) to upgrade its networks and Virgin Media delivering access at 100 Mbps to nearly 50 percent of homes, he said. The department will respond to the legislative report in due course, he said.

With almost 50 recommendations and no indication of costs or how to meet them, the report is likely “to be dismissed as nothing more than a pipe dream,” said Ovum analyst Matthew Howett. Lawmakers rightly criticized officials’ “vague ambition” to have the “best superfast broadband in Europe by 2015” and called for more clarity on speeds, he said. But many aspects of the document “will strike many as simply odd,” he said. Some recommendations seem to ignore that fact that access to BT’s copper and fiber network is already available on equivalent and non-discriminatory terms and that winners of state funding must provide open wholesale access to their networks, he said. The report also slams the government for allowing time for market forces to play out, he said. But the private sector is still willing and able to roll out next-generation broadband to parts of the country originally deemed underserved, he said. The report also has many inconsistencies, Howett said. It knocks the government for dismissing technologies such as white spaces, but almost fails to mention how mobile might contribute to bringing broadband to all areas in Britain, other than to suggest that all existing spectrum be handed over to mobile operators and current TV traffic move to the Internet, without considering the impact this would have on bandwidth demands or incentives for network investment, he said.

The report should be applauded for “opening the door to a debate on new ways of looking at infrastructure and spectrum,” said Blair Levin, a fellow at the Aspen Institute and former executive director of the FCC Omnibus Broadband Initiative. His broadband team talked internally about the economics and policies involved with moving all TV broadcasting to a Web-based model, freeing up significant spectrum, but decided for various reasons not to proceed, he told us. Levin said he admires countries that have that debate, because it’s important for the public to have “a full understanding of the trade-offs, particularly as to the use of the most valuable public resource in the broadband ecosystem -- spectrum.” As the facts change, as they always do, public and private officials will be better prepared to change their views rather than changing the facts to fit the views, he said. The purpose of documents such as the Lords report is to set targets to shoot at or for “rather than laying out a path in concrete,” Levin said. “So put me down for admiring the British for opening up the door for a good public hearing on all the options and for obviously not caring about short-term PR.”