Rather under the radar this week, KPN, the Dutch incumbent, announced that it would be opening its FTTH networks to its competitors, in order to maximise the utilisation of their network.

In a deal with Reggefiber (a fibre network construction specialist) KPN will take a share in existing local FTTH projects and build on these as they deploy their FTTH network.

This is an interesting development in the EU context. The majority of incumbents within the EU are less than enthusiastic about opening up their networks having made such a large investment, but KPN have positioned this as an appropriate way to share the risk and ensure utilisation of the network. It moves KPN closer towards a civil utility-type of model, with many providers offering services over the network, owned by a single operator.

The local/community projects are also an interesting aspect of this development, as it shows that these can play an important role in demonstrating that these networks can be efficiently deployed - Reggefiber’s assets in the local networks they have built out are included in the joint venture with KPN.

BT today announced that they plan to spend £1.5bn to provide superfast broadband to around 10m homes by 2012. The BT press release can be found here.

The BSG has issued a statement welcoming this development, which can be found here.

uSwitch.com has collected data on the speeds received by those who visit their site, and compared them to the maximum speeds these users signed up to receive. Similar to the recent research from the BBC and thinkbroadband.com, they found that the majority of users did not receive the maximum speeds that they signed up to.

This is not a surprise, of course. The speed of a broadband connection depends on many factors, including the number of other users online at the same time, the distance of a connection from the local exchange, the tuning of the modem in the home, and even faulty electrical goods within the home, which are clearly outside of the control of ISPs (see this excellent atricle in PC Pro for tips on how to improve your broadband speed).

But is speed really the be all and end all of broadband performance? There are other aspects of a broadband service that impact on performance, as I have discussed before, and these are often overlooked.

Improvements in these factors that affect performance could make far more difference to the current broadband experience than improvements in speed alone.

Following the earlier piece, I thought I’d briefly set out what the economic benefits are that are identified in our ‘A Framework’ report, in order to illustrate where we think value would accrue.

The largest categories of private value in the report are: doing things that we do now, but more efficiently; doing more of what we do now; and doing new things.

Each of these categories of value has the potential to be very significant. We make no attempt to quantify the last two, as it would be difficult (if not impossible) to do so.

Doing things more efficiently we have attempted to quantify. Based on 80% coverage, if 50% of broadband users saved 3% of their time, time savings worth £0.9bn per annum would be achieved (based on a value of leisure time used by government studies).

Note this is only an assumption, for indicative purposes. We would be interested in seeing any evidence that could refine this value, such as more detailed research on the activities consumers do online and how long they spend doing them.

The largest categories of wider economic value were: resilience, adaptability and policy options; and spill-over and virtual agglomeration. Again, these were not quantified as this was not appropriate, but we think these are likely to be significant in value.

The substitution possibilities created by next generation broadband would mean that the economy would be far more resilient and able to adapt to shocks, for example an oil price shock by providing alternative to travel. This also creates an additional range of options available to policy makers, which would be highly valuable in itself.

Virtual agglomeration had been identified as likely to be a big benefit from next generation broadband. Agglomeration refers to the productivity benefits of cities and clusters of activity - London, for example, has a higher productivity level than other areas in the UK. Through virtual agglomeration, next generation broadband could achieve some of the benefits of clusters and cities, and without some of the costs of cities such as congestion and pollution.

We also identified other categories of wider economic benefit, such as: an increase in competition in the economy; network effects as consumers and businesses both in the UK and across the world move to next generation broadband; reduced traffic congestion; the value created by the re-use of land and buildings no longer required by a next generation broadband network; reduced business travel; increased online backup; video distribution; and improved connectivity for SMEs. Some of these we did attempt to quantify, such as a reduction in business travel. For our estimations see section 5 of the report.

That’s the whistlestop tour of the categories of benefits we identified. We are keen to see these categories built on over time. We hope that as evidence emerges we will be able to more accurately populate this framework, to build up a more accurate quantitative picture of the benefit of next generation broadband.