UK's National Audit Office warns full-fibre rollout strategy is leaving rural Britain behind. Again
- Reference: 1602853212
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/10/16/national_audit_office/
- Source link:
In "Improving Broadband", the NAO - a Parliamentary body that scrutinises public sector spending in Britain - today warned that industry will struggle to hit the government's target of offering nationwide gigabit coverage by 2025, particularly when it comes to [2]the hardest-to-reach 20 per cent of the country — which largely refers to rural settlements and shires.
The full-fibre broadband programme initially prioritised premises unable to access 30Mbps connections, in a strategy dubbed "outside-in." The NAO expressed concern that as the [3]2025 deadline looms, infrastructure providers may be tempted to shift their focus to so-called "low-hanging fruit," namely high population density areas like towns and cities.
The NAO said that if providers opt to take this route, the gap in broadband provision could widen. "By the end of 2025, some premises may still lack superfast speeds, let alone gigabit connectivity," it said.
This prediction affirms previous expressions of concern from infrastructure providers, as well as from the Deaprtment of Culture, Media and Sport, which said reaching the final 1 per cent of the country will be "prohibitively expensive", and would likely require the use of alternative technologies.
To date, 14 per cent of the UK has access to full-fibre broadband. Gigabit coverage extends to 27 per cent when you count other similarly-capable technologies, like 5G. Overall, this penetration ranks among the lowest in Europe.
To prevent the further deepening of the rural/city broadband divide, the NAO recommended the DCMS explicitly lay out its deployment priorities. This would accompany a detailed plan that would define how it would meet the 2025 deadline, as well as transparent progress updates.
Similar woes befell the [4]Superfast Broadband Programme of the 2010s. This program aimed to modernise the UK's ageing copper-based broadband network with an ambitious FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) deployment strategy. This programme aimed to provide superfast broadband (defined as either 24Mbps or 30Mbps, depending on whether you talk to Building Digital UK or Ofcom) to 95 per cent of the country by 2017.
Unfortunately, the Superfast programme had unequal outcomes. While coverage in towns and cities was good, only 80 per cent of UK rural premises saw a speed upgrade. Coverage in Northern Ireland was particularly bad, with only 66 per cent of rural premises able to access speeds of 30Mbps, according to the report.
The watchdog nonetheless highlighted some areas for optimism, citing the overall resilience of the UK's broadband network in [5]the face of increased demand at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic , with only marginal decreases in speed and availability. ®
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[1] https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Improving-broadband.pdf
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/17/uk_govt_fiber_rollout/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/11/openreach_lobbies_for_changes_to_get_full_fibre_by_2025/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/27/uk_treasury_allocates_250_million_pounds_for_95_per_cent_superfast_broadband_by_2017/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/14/broadband_speeds_uk_march/
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Moving goalposts
That's what I thought. When I read "some premises may still lack superfast speeds, let alone gigabit connectivity". I thought "Let Alone!?" Gigabit is pretty damned fast, and should be enough for even the hungriest of bandwidth needs for quite some time for the vast majority of people.
OW
"Coverage in Northern Ireland was particularly bad..."
Rub salt in an open wound, why don't you
I'm on 2Mbps over here, living about 2.5 miles outside a Northern Ireland town. I was recently overjoyed at taking delivery on a nice piece of IT kit, before finding out that the associated software would take SIX DAYS to download. Best case, with 100% utilisation of my connection.
It's a sodding joke, it really is. I'm tempted to set up a business that has shops in local town centres with popular packages pre-downloaded and stored on-site. Come in with a USB key, select a package, show proof you've already paid for it, copy over USB3 and take away. Minor charge taken for provision of service.
Re: OW
the associated software would take SIX DAYS to download.
Must be nice kit if it needs 120 GByte of software! Hope it never needs patching.
Re: OW
You could set up a DVD-by-mail delivery service too. Like Netflx, but through the post. Call it Postflix? (oh, wait. They already did that 10 years ago). But they called it Netflix.
Better than
The absolute train wreck that the government's superfarce voucher scheme was. Got a grant for £3k for a 100Mbit connection then we had to pay £50 a month.
It was great for I assume the minimum period of 24 months then they degraded the service to the point it was unusable! I checked the kit they used / long range Wi-Fi antenna and a Cisco switch, cost no more that £1k and even that's a stretch. They totally took the government for a ride !
Arsehats like this are the problem! What a waste of money.
How on earth is this prohibitively expensive?
My guess, supplying broadband to the x% of the hardest-to-reach households is not as lucrative as they would like it to be. Heck, even if laying fiber to the remotest Glenns is more expensive than the telco would make from the subscriptions originating from the Glenn, isn't infrastructure supposed to cross-finance itself? I.e. using some part of the nice profits from getting hundreds of subscriptions from one fibre laid into a London suburb to subsidize the laying of fiber into the Glenn?
It's time, telcos face some regulation which corresponds to the importance of their service.
"the internet you're providing feels like vital infrastructure. How about a mandate to service all citizens?"
Never mind, I am off into the weekend.
Well obviously. Investment goes to urban areas first when it is useful. Then the countryside gets subsidised later.
So obviously the countryside is going to get left behind when the network is upgraded.
What's the alternative? Upgrade the country backwards, most expensive, lowest impact first?
What's the alternative? Upgrade the country backwards, most expensive, lowest impact first?
Yes. Because you need to define "impact".
In towns, VDSL means you can typically get 30-70Mb (or 300+ with Vermin). Moving to 100Mb/1Gb FTTP is nice, but not a significant jump. Yes, your updates will download a bit quicker, but you're talking 5minutes instead of 10 minutes (for instance). Upgrading VDSL to G.Fast or FTTP isn't going to make an appreciable difference to my life unless you're going to bundle in static IPs and symmetric uploads so I can host servers from home. QoS (in both technical and feature terms) becomes far more important than throughput.
By contrast, many rural areas remain stuck on 1-5Mb. They will NEVER get 30Mb because even if OpenRetch claim that they're connected to a "fibre" exchange (as my parents technically are), the two miles of corroded copper from the VDSL cabinet renders it meaningless. Theirs must be one of the least contended cabinets in the country - all that juicy fibre and nobody can put more than 5-8Mb over it!
My parents - and their entire community - will go from 1Mb to 100Mb when G.Fast or FTTP arrives. There is no in-between (unless we get sick of it and do our own community WISP, which we're actually looking into).
So yes, having - quite reasonably - done the "high impact" (where impact = user numbers) business of getting towns and cities onto FTTC, the FTTP rollout should be started in the countryside, where it will have a far higher impact than in urban areas.
My wife and I are both WFH in an urban area and as it turns out - 30/15Mb is more than adequate unless I wanted to start a hosting company. But even then, no retail provider is going to give you sensible upload speeds - my brother gets "fibre" in his London flat (fibre into the basement, then Cat6 to each unit, up to 1Gb if he wants to pay for it). For some inexplicable reason the provider gives him 100/20 even though it's a symmetric bearer.
How about slowest areas first, that would give the biggest benefit for locals. the jump from 1-2mbs up to 50+ would transform rural business prospects far more than an urban jump from 50+ to 200+ where a second line wouldn't break the bank.
For most people being able to stream a film or two is fast enough, the urban upgrades are not free so why would they stump up cash for the extra capacity.
Cable install costs will be written off over decades while the rental fees will just keep rolling in, so over the long term there's little difference on the installers balance sheet either.
Given up waiting.
Once my ADSL contract is up, switching to a wireless solution at the same price as BT fibre.
Royle says...
Rural... my arse.
And I have to agree with him... I am living in 100k+ town and it took until two years ago to get FTTC.
From item 6 of the summary in the report: "Since we last reported, the Superfast Programme has moved increasingly to gigabit-capable full-fibre solutions in
place of copper telephone wires from premises to a local cabinet."
So they've switching from an approach where the individual premises connections are handled by existing infrastructure to one where the existing infrastructure has to be replaced. Is it surprising that things have slowed?
For the more widely scattered farms it may well be that a direct fibre connection is the only effective one and if the sites suitable for FTTC have all been supplied this is reasonable and inevitable but I do wonder if this is a matter of selecting those who already have a good service and replacing it with better whilst those without hang on for longer and longer.
Moving goalposts
So "superfast" is now 1Gbit/s? I suppose when they start rolling that out the bar will be raised to 10GBit/s, just to keep up the "UK is crap" mantra?
It's true that only 14% can get "full fibre", but from [1]other reports "At present the United Kingdom actually does quite well in terms of so-called “superfast” (aka – NGA) coverage at speeds of 30Mbps+ (around 96-97%), while a little over half of premises can order an “ultrafast” service of 100Mbps+ (aka – VHCN) – mostly thanks to FTTP and Virgin Media’s hybrid fibre DOCSIS. " which shows that the UK has actually met the targets mentioned in the article: "superfast broadband (defined as either 24Mbps or 30Mbps, depending on whether you talk to Building Digital UK or Ofcom) to 95 per cent of the country", albeit a couple of years late. At the end of the day it's the speed & latency that really matter, not the physical medium used to deliver the link.
A more recent report (from June) says " the UK’s NGA coverage manages to put us ahead of other major EU economies like Germany, France, Italy and Spain " and I can vouch for that personally. I live in semi-rural France, about a year ago they built a fibre exchange just across the road from my house. They spent most of last year digging up & trenching the roads and lanes, yet this whole area is still listed as getting fibre "after 2021"
[1] https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/05/most-eu-countries-and-uk-set-to-miss-targets-for-fibre-access.html