September has been a busy month in the world of next generation broadband. Government reviews, UK and EU regulatory consultations, not to mention our report on the cost of fibre-based next generation broadband, have certainly moved the debate on in the UK.

The month started with the BSG publishing its report ‘The costs of deploying fibre-based next generation broadband‘. This report used geographic and cost data specific to the UK, allowing us to model the cost of deployment across a variety of geotypes. The long and the short of this is that the report suggests that fibre to the cabinet will cost up to £5.1bn, and fibre to the home up to £28.8bn.

The total costs are interesting, but the purpose of the report was to breakdown the various cost components, to examine where the real costs lie. Unsurprisingly, this was in the civil infrastructure elements of the network - 42% of total costs for FTTC, and up to 80% of total costs for FTTH. Any steps that could be taken to reduce these costs would obviously help reduce this barrier to investment, and the report modelled how various actions, such as if higher duct re-use was possible, would impact the overall costs.

The report also clearly set out that there is a definite difference in the cost of deployment between urban, rural and remote areas of the UK. For fibre to the cabinet, for example, the cheapest 58% of households would cost £1.9bn to deploy to; the next 26% would cost £1.4bn, and the most expensive 16% would cost a further £1.8bn. Clearly, deploying beyond the first 60% of UK households will be a more challenging case for investors to make, which has a number of implications for government and the regulator.

This was closely followed by the launch of the final report of the Caio Review - ‘The Next Phase of Broadband UK: Action now for long term competitiveness‘. The Review suggested that, while we shouldn’t be panicking about a lack of NGA in the UK, the government could take actions to reduce the barriers to investment, and set out the need for leadership from the government and the regulator. A range of initiatives were recommended, including providing certainty for investors and reducing the costs of deployment, while increasing the competitive pressure on copper-based services, and benchmarking our performance against other countries while considering the ‘batstop’ remedies should the market fail to deliver NGA.

We welcomed these recommendations at the time, and look forward to hearing the government’s response to the Review. Certainly, our reports over the last 18 months have supported the conclusions and recommendations of the Review.

What followed was then followed by a flurry of regulatory activity. First, the European Commission set out its long-awaited draft Recommendation on the regulation of NGA. The Recommendation sets out how the Commission would like regulation to support investment and competition in next generation broadband, and makes for interesting reading for Ofcom and the operators, who will no doubt be submitting their views to the Commission before the 14 November deadline.

This was swiftly followed by Ofcom themselves publishing their latest consultation on the regulatory environment for NGA, ‘Delivering superfast broadband in the UK‘. The consultation discusses a range of issues and, although differing in depth of detail across the issues, certainly moves the debate on from its previous consultation last September. Positioning itself as a ‘framework for action’, the regulator will further progress these issues through a range of activities with stakeholders.

And, just to add to the fun, the Commission has also now begun its second periodic review of the Unviersal Service Directive, as well as launching an EU-wide broadband performance index.

Quite a lot to absorb for those of us who spend their days working on next generation broadband. So where has it left us? Well, the Caio Review has set out a number of options for government if it is serious about trying to reduce the costs of deployment. The government response will be interesting, and whether they are actually able to implement some of the suggested changes (such as to the way fibre is treated in the rating system) is up for debate. Caio’s recommendation that government and the regulator take a strong lead on NGA is one that we support, and are keen to see.

Our report has added further to the evidence base for policy making that we are committed to creating, to ensure appropriate policy is developed. It adds numbers to views that were likely already held, but also raises interesting questions, and the granularity of our figures should be of real use to those interested in local or regional broadband projects.

The Commission’s Recommendation, and Ofcom’s consultation, take us closer towards regulatory certainty than we were before, although a number of questions remain unanswered and this is unlikely to be the end of Ofcom’s process for creating the right regulatory framework. Certainly there could be a sense that every time you delve deeper into an issue, the list of questions a regulator needs to answer gets longer.

One issue worth noting is the change of view towards public sector projects. Sympathies certainly appear to have shifted within Ofcom, and possibly within BERR given the Review’s recommendations, since the DTI/Ofcom Best Practice Guide for Public Broadband Schemes was put out in 2007, and this is a welcome development.

This is one of many issues raised this month, however, and stakeholders will be watching with interest to see how these are played out in the coming months.

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.

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.

Following the launch of our report ‘A Framework’, I thought it would be worth setting down a few pieces about the benefits highlighted in the report. I’ll start with a general view of the economic impact the report sets out, which although substantial in terms of benefits, may be difficult in practice for investors to capture.

First, a brief note on the methodology. We have taken a bottom-up approach, examining where in the economy specific value could possibly accrue, rather than making general estimations of the impact of next generation broadband on productivity or GDP. For more on this in the report, it is worth looking at the section on ‘pseudo costs and benefits’. We also broke down economic value in to two categories - private value that accrues to investors and consumers, and wider economic value.

The report sets out a wide variety of categories where value would accrue. Some of these benefits would be captured upon deployment; others would take time, require transformations and would accrue in the medium to long term. In addition some of these benefits may be impacted by various policy agendas - for example, the role for next generation broadband in reducing carbon emissions is potentially significant depending on whether a carbon tax was introduced that encouraged substitution for emission-intensive activities.

The report suggests that these benefits are potentially very large, and in the long term likely to be larger than the cost of deploying the network. Particularly, there is likely to be significant private value that will be captured by investors and consumers. This does not mean, however, that the business case is made, and in reality there are difficulties for investors in trying to capture this value.

The report highlights three key constraints on investors’ ability to capture private value. First, to the extent that next generation broadband is an experience good consumers may not be willing to pay a premium for the service until they have experienced it. Second, creating this value may require the transformation of value chains, which may take time and would be disruptive. Third, investors do not yet have accurate knowledge of how much consumers are willing to pay, meaning that there will be difficulty in setting the correct pricing structures in order to maximise how much of the value they are able to capture.

Generally, the report calls for further work that would address these and other uncertainties. Resolving these uncertainties will be key to creating a business case that is acceptable to investors. The BSG is continuing its work programme that will hopefully shed some light on these and other issues. We are keen that further evidence is put forward that can help illuminate these, and would be interested to see any evidence others have to this end.

Our recent report on the value of next generation broadband created a minor debate on itWire in Australia following a good blog article from Stuart Corner. The article captures the essence of our message on next generation broadband deployment from our recent research: it is more important to do this right than to do it now.

The size of the investment required to roll out next generation broadband in any country, the irreversibility of that investment, and the likely importance to that country’s economy and society of superfast broadband mean that the costs of getting it wrong could be significant, and that investment should occur at the most optimal time possible in order to maximise the benefits.

For the UK, our report suggests, the most optimal time is not necessarily now. There are a number of uncertainities for investors that create a large value in waiting, such as a lack of evidence of consumer willingness to pay and the current regulatory uncertainty. Over time, this value will reduce as evidence emerges and some of the uncertainties are resolved - we believe over the next 18 months or so.

Ultimately, we still believe the market is best placed to decide when and how investment in next generation broadband should be made. But this doesn’t mean we should be complacent. It is important that the work that is being done continues, including Ofcom’s work to provide regulatory certainty, the Caio review, and the work of the BSG, so that in 18 months’ time we really do have a clearer picture.

We’ve been absent from the blog for a few weeks as we’ve been finalising two new pieces of research that we believe moves the debate around next generation broadband in the UK forward, and putting on our 2008 Conference ‘Beyond Pipe Dreams?’. It’s been a busy time, but now that’s past we have a lot of issues to discuss.

First of all, the conference itself produced a lively and informed debate, with representatives from a wide variety of sectors and a range of speakers including Francesco Caio, head of the governemnt’s review of broadband. To view the presentations from the event see www.broadbanduk.org/beyondpipedreams.

The first of the two reports that we launched at the conference was ‘A Framework for Evaluating the Value of Next Generation Broadband‘. This report examines the incremental economic and social value of next generation broadband over current broadband provision in the UK.

The second report was ‘Models for efficient and effective public sector intervention in next generation broadband access networks‘. This report studies next generation broadband interventions across the world, and first generation interventions in the UK, to determine good practice for interventions in the UK.

These reports contain a lot of issues, which we will discuss in more detail in future blogs. For now, I can strongly recommend both reports if you are interested in the future of broadband in the UK.

by Peter Shearman, Policy Manager, BSG

Digital Region is not alone. Manchester City Council recently agreed to pursue a strategy of intervention to bring next generation broadband (in the form of a fibre to the home network) to Manchester, as part of a wider digital strategy for the city-region.

The plan will see the Oxford Road area used as a test-bed, covering 400 residential properties and 50 businesses, before a phased rollout elsewhere in the area, and was agreed by the Council’s Executive in March (you can read the report here). It aims to see ’significant progress on implementation’ of the initial rollout phase during 2008/09.

On the heels on Digital Region, and with other authorities in the UK examining investment in NGA, Manchester is seeking to be a UK exemplar, providing knowledge and learned experience for other authorities in the UK. It is the lead authority in the DC10plus group on its ‘next generation connectivity’ workstream, and it hopes that its experiences will assist other UK authorities.

It is not just local authorities that can learn from Manchester and others, however, but broadband providers too. In the UK it is often cited that there is a lack of evidence of willingness to pay amongst consumers, and little or no evidence of applications and services that require the bandwidth provided by superfast broadband. Evidence will begin to emerge, however, from projects such as this.

Digital Region, the Ebbsfleet development, Manchester and others that are considering next generation broadband will provide valuable evidence for both public and private organisations, increasing the understanding of the market and allowing better-informed investment decisions.

In a previous post I explored what the topics of discussion would be at the government’s Convergence Think Tank, and suggested that next generation access (NGA) would probably be a key secondary issue to public service broadcasting (PSB).

At the seminar yesterday, NGA was indeed discussed. It was interesting to see, particularly for someone fairly new to the debate, the level of interest and desire for NGA among the broadcasting world.

This isn’t surprising, of course, as it opens up a lot of avenues for them, but I was struck by one presenter’s firm conclusion that the PSB debate was the wrong focus for the future of the industry, and that superfast broadband was the most important next step. His view wasn’t necessarily shared by all in the room, but he wasn’t the only presenter to mention the importance of NGA.

Broadcasters aren’t the only industry who see benefit in NGA, and are clamouring for greater bandwidth. A key issue, though, is how will it be paid for. There is demand from industries and consumers, but is there a willingness to pay? This is a big question, and currently there is little hard evidence for investors to go on that suggest a return for their money would be likely.

The BSG’s ongoing research into the economic and social value of NGA has drawn on emerging evidence from the US, where Verizon have subscribers paying a premium for faster access over fibre. But until more is known about consumer willingness to pay, the business case for NGA will be difficult to make.

Peter Shearman, Policy Manager, BSG

Many of you will have noticed the adverts currently being run by a particular ISP, which focus on the superior speed of its fibre-based network.

This campaign taps in to the importance consumers appear to place on speed – as is demonstrated by a recent BBC Online readers’ debate about Next Generation Access.

However, while headline speeds are obviously important to consumers, particularly when they are not receiving what they feel they are paying for, download speed is not the only important characteristic of a broadband service. There are other characteristics of an NGA network that will provide value to users.

For example, although demand for faster downstream speed is uncertain, there is more certainty about the need for greater upstream speed given the increase in user-generated content. ADSL and ADSL2+ technologies, however, allow a median upstream speed of less than 1mbps. Users would almost certainly benefit from a greater upstream speed.

NGA is about more than just increased headline download speeds.

NGA is commonly now being defined by a set of attributes relating to, for example, improved quality of service, consistency of bandwidth across users and time, less interference, lower latency, and greater symmetry between upstream and downstream speeds. These characteristics, and others, would improve the Internet experience and provide value to users.

Faster downstream speeds are certainly not the only benefits from moving to an NGA network. It is important that the benefits of the other, less-discussed characteristics are captured in the debate, as these will make an important contribution to the enhanced user experience that NGA networks will provide.

Peter Shearman, Policy Manager, BSG