Categories
broadband Business

Future Broadband Planning Requirements

It seems to be one of those weeks where UK broadband stories are coming thick and fast. Not only that, but more and more people are pitching in with considered opinions on stories and, in fact, the comments are beginning to make for far more valuable reading than the original articles! And perhaps that could be the case here too. 😉

I want to follow up today on two stories that have broken this week on new build and broadband.

The first story was on ThinkBroadband, regarding a new build housing estate in West Yorkshire and broadband availability for the new homeowners in Calderdale. ThinkBroadband believes that this new estate will have a reasonably good chance of achieving that oh-so-elusive “superfast” connectivity from cab 106 — approx 93% chance of greater than 30Mbps. (Bear in mind that this is only in reference to download, so anyone looking for a reasonable upload should hold their horses before buying!)

The ThinkBroadband article makes the point that though this is not a rural cab it has been funded by BDUK, which if you recall was for the Final Third and rural properties, so questions probably ought to be asked as to why taxpayer money is being used to fund what should have fallen into BT’s commercial rollout in Halifax.

Oh look, in the comments! Questions *are* being asked!

John Popham notes:

This is all good news for the people who live in this area, but….. this is a relatively new housing development built well beyond the point when most of society realised that broadband was an essential component of life. And now, the taxpayer is having to subsidise their connections. This does not make any sense at all.

Can it be that difficult to put planning conditions into new developments that they must make provision for fibre-to-the-premises connections? From the developers’ viewpoint it would help the properties to sell.

Popham makes an extremely valid point that should be raised over and over again. Why have planning agencies, housing developers, and the government not yet cottoned on to the importance of building homes that are broadband enabled? Isn’t that like building houses that from the moment the architect gets involved are not legislated to be environmentally friendly, cheaper to heat, with a reduced carbon footprint and so on? Ah….no, we have not yet mastered that either.

So whereby countries other than the UK can 3D print a whole house out of recycled materials for less than £1500 in a couple of hours, we have not yet quite gotten around to enforcing environmental standards on new build, let alone tech requirements?

Categories
4g Business ofcom

EE by gum – 4G hits the fells

EE 4G availability in CumbriaTwitter informs me that EE has launched its 4G broadband service in Cumbria. Great. Their press release tells us that their coverage extends over nearly 100 square miles and over 2,000 residents, many of whom are homeworkers.

A quick scan shows that this news is all over tinterweb. For some reason no one other than B4RN sends me press releases so I don’t have a blog post already written about this one :). Not that that is a big deal – most of the stuff out there just regurgitates the press release which ain’t particularly imaginative or value add.

What would be interesting to see is the business case put together within EE for the service. Prices apparently start from £15.99 a month and presumably scale up based on bandwidth consumption. Assuming the take up was in line with the national uptake for broadband (74% in Q1 2011 according to Ofcom) and bearing in mind the lack of competition then that would give EE 1,480 * £16 = £23,680 a month or just shy of £300k a year revenues. I would guess they will be able to make money out of that. I’d also expect users signing up for this service to buy other EE services so I should think the overall revenues will be quite a bit higher.

Out of interest I went into EE’s availability checker it told me that the service wasn’t available in Cumbria yet! I don’t live there anyway!! If I did live in Cumbria I would buy the service and find out what this internet thing is all about.

That’s all…