UK considers universal service legislative requirement

Families face paying thousands for high speed internet access | Daily Mail Online:

Every family will win the right to demand a ‘fast’ broadband connection it was announced in the Queen’s Speech yesterday, but those in remote communities may have to pay hundreds of pounds to get it. The new Digital Economy Bill hopes to finally bring broadband technology to one million people whose properties have until now been treated as economically unviable or too difficult to provide with high-speed connections. But the legislation falls short of the Conservative Party’s manifesto pledge to ensure every home gets access to so-called ‘superfast’ broadband.

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Adam Marshall, of the British Chambers of Commerce said: ‘If implemented in full and at pace, this could go some way to improving the poor digital connectivity that far too many firms face.’Government sources said BT, which is in line for subsidies worth 1 billion to roll out broadband to 95 per cent of homes by the end of next year, has resisted the idea of a legal guarantee. But ministers have decided the threat of legal action is needed to ensure the final five per cent of homes also get a decent connection.

It boggles the mind to consider a relatively small island nation has so many premises still off the Internet grid in 2016. The U.S. already has a universal service/nondiscrimination requirement in law per the Federal Communications Commission's 2015 Open Internet rulemaking but is not enforcing it.

Internet infrastructure emerging as political issue in UK; America likely to follow

When people in the United Kingdom go online, many of them likely mutter -- or shout -- “bloody hell,” particularly in the evenings when video streaming gobbles up bandwidth and degrades the quality of their connections.

That dissatisfaction with Internet service is now being politically mobilized, with nearly 20 percent of UK voters indicating Internet infrastructure policy will be top of mind when they go to the polls, according to a recent survey. That number will likely rise as bandwidth demand inexorably grows at pace rivalling Moore’s Law on microprocessor capacity, doubling about every 18-24 months.

Similarly, I expect American voters will increasingly cast their votes based on candidates’ positions on Internet infrastructure expansion given the U.S. Federal Communications Commission reported in January that Internet infrastructure deployment in the United States was failing to keep pace with today’s advanced, high-quality voice, data, graphics and video offerings. The FCC’s 2015 Broadband Progress Report found 55 million Americans – 17 percent of the population – lack access to Internet connections capable of delivering bandwidth of 25 Mbps for downloads and 3 Mbps for upload.

An indication of Americans’ growing political interest in Internet service is the large volume of comments the FCC received on its recent rulemaking that classified Internet as a common carrier telecommunications service as well as the substantial coverage of the issue in mainstream media.

Slow broadband wipes 20% off house prices - Telegraph

Slow broadband wipes 20% off house prices - Telegraph: Slow broadband speeds can wipe as much as 20 per cent off the value of properties and lack of superfast connectivity in an area can be a dealbreaker in house sales, property experts have said.

With growing numbers of people going online to perform tasks ranging from working to grocery shopping and streaming entertainment, good broadband has become critical.

Property search website Rightmove has now added a broadband speed checker to every one of its listings alongside factors such as quality of local schools and transport links.

It's only a matter of time before we'll see this spread to the United States where plenty of residential properties nominally in the service areas of incumbent telephone and cable companies nevertheless lack Internet connections.

Internet infrastructure outpolls transportation infrastructure in UK

UK People Want Superfast Broadband More than New Airports and HS2 - ISPreview UK

Watch for this sentiment to spread to other nations including the U.S.

Poor internet connections in the countryside are hitting rural property market, estate agents warn - Telegraph

One agent who helps customers buy homes worth more than £1 million told The Daily Telegraph yesterday he was advising all of his clients against looking at properties that have slow internet speeds.

It came as reports in Scotland claimed people dubbed "digital refugees" were now moving from the countryside in search of faster internet speeds in the country's towns and cities. Frank Speir, director at Prime Purchase said: "Slow broadband speeds are having a definite effect on the market. It's becoming a much bigger issue." 

 via Poor internet connections in the countryside are hitting rural property market, estate agents warn - Telegraph

This is bound to become a much bigger issue in America as well.  Notwithstanding some high profile limited 1 Gigabit closed fiber to the premise networks in metro areas, much of the countryside remains without modern Internet connectivity, still served with dial up technology that was state of the art when Bill Clinton was beginning his first term as US president.

Conversely, a property having a fast fiber Internet pipe is more desirable, according to a 2009 study of U.S. broadband consumers, finding 82 percent of homebuyers with fiber to the home ranked it as the leading real estate development amenity.

UK Internet infrastructure subsidization policy reveals split between citizens and incumbent telco BT

BBC News - Rural broadband: How to reach the broadband notspots

This BBC article goes into good detail on the Internet infrastructure deployment difficulties in the UK. As in America with AT&T, the incumbent telco, BT, prefers to deploy slowly over a period of many years, employing FTTN (Fiber to the Node) network architecture (or FTTC as it's called in Britain -- Fiber To The Cabinet). AT&T's analogue is its U-Verse product, which feeds neighborhood nodes with fiber and uses existing copper twisted pair cable designed decades ago for voice service to bridge the final link to customer premises. However, unlike BT, AT&T limits U-Verse to urban and suburban areas.

British households and small businesses left of the Internet are running short of patience with the slow BT rollout after having waiting about a decade to get some form of wireline Internet connections. Some communities see the passage of time and burgeoning bandwidth demand as having technologically obsoleted FTTC and want Fiber to the Home (FTTH) infrastructure.

Government subsidies are available.  As the article notes, a big question is whether they continue to go toward older but less costly FTTC infrastructure favored by BT or FTTH preferred by the locals who don't want to spend more years waiting for modern Internet connectivity and want a greater degree of control over infrastructure deployment in their communities.

Satellite broadband: can it light up the UK's broadband blackspots? | News | TechRadar

Satellite broadband: can it light up the UK's broadband blackspots? | News | TechRadar: Due to the distance the signal travels, latencies never dropped below 700ms and hovered around the 800ms mark. Even with predictive caching that makes web browsing speedy, there's always that near-second delay traversing pages. It's not annoying enough to stop you browsing, but it just doesn't feel as snappy as a landline internet connection.

Despite new sooper dooper "Surfbeam" technology, latency remains sub par as this story shows and bandwidth is costly and rationed. This item appeared the same day as this ridiculous story on Google's O3b satellite venture that will supposedly provide 1 gigabit speeds via medium orbit satellites. And at latencies of less than 150 milliseconds, according to this IDG News Service account.

I'm not buying it. Satellite Internet sucks, period. It cannot support reliable voice or real time video connections or provide a high quality Internet connectivity user experience. Google should scuttle this misadventure and instead partner with community fiber projects instead of perpetuating this substandard Internet connection scheme to as a poor substitute to badly needed fiber to the premise infrastructure. 

The rural "digital divide" isn't the same in UK, US

Millions miss-out as Britain's broadband divide reaches record levels - Yahoo! Finance UK: Telecoms regulator Ofcom warned the difference between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' would also get worse before it gets better as telecom and pay-TV giants focus investment on next generation "superfast" fibre networks in Britain's biggest towns.

Figures revealed by Ofcom today showed the average internet connection speed in urban areas is now 26.4Mb per second. In rural areas it's just 9.9Mb. Rural speeds have more than doubled since 2011 but households in the countryside now trail city dwellers by an unprecedented 16.5Mb per second.

Americans living in rural, quasi-rural and exurban locales and stuck with dialup or satellite or forced to make do with costly, data capped mobile broadband for their premises Internet service would find this account puzzling. For them, having access to nearly 10Mbs throughput would hardly be considered deprivation at the present time.

How BDUK bungled Britain’s next-gen broadband rollout | PC Pro blog

Interesting dispatch from the UK that portrays the dominant incumbent telecoms provider, BT, as favoring American AT&T U-Verse-style FTTC (Fiber To the Cabinet) over Fiber to the Premise (FTTP), apparently to avoid the higher cost of the latter network architecture.

The UK Government entity charged with overseeing that nation's Internet infrastructure program also allegedly ruled out fixed terrestrial wireless as a viable premises service option. That's consistent with the first point since fiber would have to be deployed to bring it very close to premises in order to achieve high wireless throughput.

Broadband 'black spots' across UK - Yahoo! News UK

Broadband 'black spots' across UK - Yahoo! News UK: Britons living in rural areas are stuck in "digital ghettos", an expert has warned as figures showed average broadband speeds have more than trebled in the UK.

These now reach 12 megabits per second (Mbps) - around three times the speeds recorded in 2008 and up by a third in the six months from May to November.

But "black spots" still exist across the country and users face a "postcode lottery" in terms of the service they receive, it was claimed.

More than three years ago, Prince Charles warned of the emergence of UK "broadband deserts."  Apparently he was right. 

Fed up with circular debate over telecom market failure, British village acts to get broadband

While the UK government (just like America's) engages in a ridiculous circular debate over whether market failure has hampered the deployment of modern telecommunications infrastructure, the residents of Lyddington, Rutland have cried "bullocks!"and taken matters into their own hands.

No debate over market failure there, where according to this Telegraph article their petitions to the incumbent providers to bring them broadband got them nothing. So several local businesses are investing fiber optic cable that will bring the townspeople connectivity of 40 Mbs for £30 a month.

A key excerpt:

Dr Charles Trotman, head of rural business development at the Country Land and Business Association welcomed the project.

But he warned that not all local communities will be able to do it themselves and the next Government must put in place measures to ensure the whole country has superfast broadband.

"You cannot rely on the markets to do it because we know for a fact that large telecommunication companies will not invest in rural areas because there is no market return. If they are not willing to do it then someone has to do it and you have to have a central strategy set by Government"

The view from the UK: America's "lame" "costly" "third-world" telecom infrastructure

The Economist offers this critical perspective on America's "lame" "costly" "third-world" telecommunications infrastructure that combines the worst of all worlds with poor quality service at high cost compared to other advanced nations. But the dreary state of affairs isn't much better across the pond in the magazine's UK home base either. Just a few months ago, Prince Charles warned much of the British countryside is in danger of becoming a "broadband desert," hamstrung by an aging, latency copper wire infrastructure that can't deliver sufficient throughput to enough of the populace.

As Exhibit A of the U.S. broadband gap, the magazine pointed to the outpouring of supplications to Google urging the company to roll out its experimental 1 Gigabit fiber to the premises telecom infrastructure in their communities.

Much of the article goes on to repeat the same points made elsewhere about the flaws of the U.S. telecom paradigm and the sturm und drang industrialized nations are undergoing as they transition from legacy wireline single purpose systems designed to deliver voice and television signals to fiber optic infrastructures capable of providing multimedia and interactive applications using Internet protocol.

The article closes with a bit of wireless vaporware by suggesting Verizon is abandoning its FiOS fiber to the premises service in favor of Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless service that could deliver 150Mbs. Perhaps over Starfleet Command's quantum sub-space channel. But not in today's world where people are literally jumping into freezing lakes in hopes of getting Google to deploy real state of the art fiber technology to their homes and businesses.

Virgin trials aerial FTTP in UK countryside

Conventional wisdom holds that fiber to the premises telecom plant isn't cost feasible in less populated regions because it requires costly trenching and won't generate sufficient revenues. Some U.S. telecom experts including Tim Nulty have challenged that notion. Now Virgin Media is going to attempt to prove the conventional wisdom wrong with a FTTP aerial deployment in the rural UK village of Woolhampton, according to this TechWorld item.

If Virgin can show aerial fiber to the premise is doable even within a for-profit business context, it could spur both for profit and nonprofit aerial fiber build outs in the U.S. and elsewhere.

A broadband farce in the UK countryside

Here's an appalling story from the British countryside that has some parallels in America where folks stuck on dial up or forced to suck a satellite have been given similar stratospheric broadband price quotes (and no stock or options) from incumbent telcos and cable providers. This story also illustrates the need for the UK to ditch its outmoded, copper cable plant that relies on highly constrained "little broadband" DSL.

Looks like the village of Dufton is a representative outpost deep in the UK "broadband desert" recently lamented by Prince Charles.