In his first major speech on broadband, minister for competitiveness Stephen Timms announced he is to chair a summit later this year to discuss the future of internet connectivity in the UK.

Addressing the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG), Timms pointed to Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) records showing the number of fibre-to-the-home connections in the UK as zero, compared with 46,000 in the Slovak Republic, 900,000 in the US and almost eight million in Japan.

The BSG is the government’s advisory group on broadband and its chief executive, Antony Walker, is worried about the UK’s business competitiveness being harmed by the UK’s lack of residential and business optical fibre. Walker pointed out that the length of time it takes to deploy new networks meant that “unless we start answering some of these big questions there is a risk that we will suffer in the future”.
BSG chairman Kip Meek urged the government to “benchmark the UK’s broadband infrastructure against its economic competitors”.

Communications watchdog Ofcom is currently looking into how the UK’s regulatory framework should evolve to enable service providers to deliver faster access. “The fundamental question is how should this regulatory framework be re-balanced to take account of the much higher [commercial] risk that will be involved in deploying next-generation infrastructure,” Walker said.

Timms said there may be a case for government intervention to kick-start the process of upgrading the UK’s network infrastructure. He said the summit would “consider the circumstances that might trigger public-sector intervention, the form that intervention might take and at what level it might sensibly take place”.

Some experts, however, believe the BSG is overstating the need for massive investment in next-generation networking. Ovum’s broadband technologies analyst, Jonathan Coham, questioned the wisdom of investing government funds in some kind of national fibre network simply because other EU countries, such as France, Germany and the Netherlands, are doing it.

Coham said there is currently little demand from residential users for 100Mbit/s connectivity, and added that “the underlying premise to investment should be a commercial and social need, and not a direct government injection into capital expenditure”.

Coham said a better solution would be for the government to help fund the roll out of high-speed networking infrastructure within key public-service sectors, such as healthcare and education, and that this would indirectly generate wider demand for faster broadband speeds. “This would be a much more sustainable and pragmatic use of public money,” he added.

But independent network expert Steve Kennedy called for a more ambitious approach whereby property developers would be under a legal obligation to install fibre “into every new build where there’s a group of several houses”.
“The 150,000 new houses that Ken Livingston says London needs should have fibre incorporated into the pre-planning,” Kennedy said.