Q&A - ntl:Telewest Business managing director Stephen Beynon

Beynon : The private sector will be the ones rolling out fibre.

The debate about how next-generation access (NGA) to broadband is rolled out to residential users has assumed an ever increasing importance. Another Ofcom consultation with industry and users on how the UK should proceed finishes today.

The recent Caio report commissioned by the Treasury and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform concluded that government intervention and subsidies should play no part in NGA delivery.

A key player in the future of broadband Britain is cable provider Ntl:Telewest Business. Stephen Beynon has been managing director of the firm since March 2005, and Computing asked him how he thinks the UK will proceed.

How and who do you think will be bankrolling next-generation access given the current economic climate in the UK?

Stephen Beynon : It will be the private sector, I don't think with the commitments this government currently has, that it can finance a fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) commitment. The problem is that you can't just roll out a little bit of fibre – you have to do full deployments.

We've had success with 40Gbit/s across our core network - in fact at we have a growing business supplying backhaul capacity, but the core is not a problem – it's all about access and everybody has this problem. What to do about the last two-and-a-half kilometres?

What we're seeing at the moment is a big unbundling effort by ISPs. Everybody has got their equipment into 1,000 to 1,200 exchanges – but everybody has gone into the same exchanges. So residential customers are being upgraded from, say, 2Mbit/s if you're lucky, to relatively higher network speeds, and this is causing demand to explode in copper networks, which in turn puts pressure on others to upgrade their core networks.

Has a similar problem this affected ntl:Telewest?

Our peak usage has increased 700 per cent with the actual peak being eight o'clock at night. Even at three to four o'clock in the morning it's not the case that there's zero network traffic flowing at all – there's a lot of peer-to-peer traffic at that time.

The DSL operators will have similar times of peak usage and all this is on the existing copper infrastructure. The big question is what happens next. BT provided its answer when it announced a £1.5bn investment, which will be mainly fibre to the kerb and providing 50Mbit/s using VDSL in 2012.

We're launching a 50Mbit/s service this year over co-axial cable from our 38,000 street cabinets, and you have to remember that our business data networks are deployed on the same infrastructure as our consumers.

What are ntl:Telewest's experiences of the trend towards more flexible working in the UK?

I think flexible working - as in home working - is beginning to take off, and we're deploying SSL virtual private networks (VPNs) for firms to help these workers connect to their corporate sites and also have on net voice calls. We have a deployment with Haringey council, who are really pushing this, and it's resulting in better attendance and also lower sick leave for staff.

The recent announcement from Openreach about wholesale price reductions for key access and backhaul packages will ripple through the system, dropping Ethernet business prices, and leading to rapidly rising demand. We currently have double digit quarterly compound growth in existing demand for Ethernet from our own customer base, and it's flexible working that's driving this demand.

There's also another form of flexible working that's driving Ethernet demand, and that's flexibility in the office. A good example is the Heart of Hounslow health centre, which is going to be a flagship polyclinic. This health centre has had a multimillion-pound investment to make sure it is fully utilised – so one day part of the clinic is set up as a child health surgery and the next day the same space will be used to address a different area of healthcare. You can't do that without being able to re-configure the communications network quickly.

Another point about flexible working is that people's increasing use of home technology is leading to a situation that people say: "Why isn't it like that at work." People connecting over video links and using more social networking applications could overstress the current bandwidth with the result that the service available through the local loop network infrastructure might not be up to scratch.

Virgin Media recently launched a mobile broadband service, teaming up with T-Mobile, while BT also launched such a service, piggybacking on Vodafone's network. Why do you think that happened?

A lot of mobile broadband dongles being shipped are for use indoors, rather than business use, and I think 3G is a clear threat to DSL-based fixed-line services. If you have the right coverage, then the challenge is to make sure that your backhaul capabilities are good. Remember a mobile operator has about 13,000 cell sites for UK coverage. Upgrading backhaul connectivity for these sites is a £50m a year problem – putting fibre down is a £1.5bn a year problem. The mobile operators are all engaged in deploying backhaul capacity which will give better mobile broadband speeds, and this will make life tough for the DSL operators.