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Ubiquitous FTTP Broadband Business Case Crowd Source

BT says there is no business case for the rollout of ubiquitous Fibre to the Premises (FTTP broadband). I believe it.

The government says there is a business case for HS2 rail link between London and Birmingham (and beyond1). I probably believe it. After all according to Justine Greening, the Transport Secretary,  “HS2 will deliver four pounds of benefit for every additional pound spent compared to a new conventional-speed line, as well as driving regeneration, creating jobs and providing our country with the infrastructure we need to compete in the 21st century.” It must be true.

It will also no doubt save the Irish economy as gangs of ‘Navigationals’ return to the English countryside to “earn a bob” but that is another story.

I’m not aware that anyone has put much effort into a business case for ubiquitous FTTP broadband. I can see why BT wouldn’t bother. The amount we (the nation) are willing to pay for our broadband won’t make it compute. This isn’t BT’s business case to assemble. It belongs to UK PLC.

What we have ended up with is a cobbled together short to mid term programme to roll out Next Generation Access to most of us with a 2Meg bone chucked over the farm fence to the others. What we need is something that tells the government “FTTP will deliver x pounds of benefit for every additional pound spent by BDUK on the NGA project”. Simples innit!?

Problem is we don’t have the number. Is there anyone out there who can help us fill in the details? HS2 is a long term plan.  FTTP would be an infrastructure for the long term so it doesn’t have to rely on near term assumptions as who how much bandwidth people “actually need” (remember BT’s CEO Ian Livingston and his  “nobody needs more than 2Mbps”).

The HS2 business case almost certainly relied on some expensive consultancy time. I don’t have any money. What I do have is millions2 of informed people reading this blog who are able to chip in. I’m assuming  Caio’s £29Bn as a base cost for FTTP (any reduction on that number should be taken as a bonus downstream). BDUK has £530m to spend with a top up after this parliament. I’m going to be generous and call it £1Bn – add in matched funding by the regions and then BT matching that total and we come up with a number of £4Bn.

The delta cost of FTTC is therefore £25Bn. This number doesn’t sound right anymore because I’m sure that I’ve heard the figure of FTTP = 3 x FTTC but that probably doesn’t include rolling it out to the last 10% of dwellings.

Sticking with the £25Bn then we are looking for a return of £100Bn, long term,  to match the business case for universal FTTP. Let’s not worry too much about the fact that advances in technology (video conferencing, home working etc) were not considered in the HS2 business case – probably for the same reasons that there isn’t a similar document for FTTP broadband.

Discuss…

1 said with a Buzz Lightyear voice

2 remember I said I’m thinking long term here:)

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

44 replies on “Ubiquitous FTTP Broadband Business Case Crowd Source”

Verizon FIOS (US based FTTP) costs for their deployment were $750 per property passed plus $600 per subscriber connected. There are 16 million households in the UK and we could assume the Verizon (real world figures) hold up for 90%.

So that’s 14.5 million homes to pass, for a cost of $11B or £8B for getting the fiber into the ground if we then allow the rest of the homes cost twice as much to connect (on average) then we’re at a nice round £10B.

But thats where the subsidy should stop, people wanting to provide services can pay the infrastructure company to use the asset (like they do Openreach today) and build their own services on top (and yes it needs to be a newco that can design the solution without being tied to historic deployments)

That initial £10B would then be recoverable over 25 years at £5 per month per subscriber which is less than the cost of the raw copper connection today…

What is the cost to UK plc if we don’t do it. That is what we really should look at. There is a danger we are going to be left as a third world country in the digital revolution. We were leaders in the industrial one, but now all our industries are gone. How are we going to stay afloat? A fast train from Brum to Londinium isn’t going to save us.
We can spend the next 10 years baling out the incumbent and still have to do the job right once policy makers realise they have wasted all the money, or we can do it right NOW.

The way to do it right is to start in the hardest to reach areas, get fibre out to those who are still waiting for the promised ‘broadband’ from 1st generation adsl lines. We can put the money into altnets, who will quickly start to hoover up the urban fringes, and force the bloated monopoly currently tying us to its phone lines to upgrade instead of paying shareholders and bosses.

The cost to the nation if we don’t do it. That is what we should look at.
But back to your question…
Savings in healthcare and efficiency. Billions.
Savings in education. Billions
Savings in eGov. Billions.
Savings in time. Billions
Savings in carbon footprint. Billions.
Increased production in the few remaining industries we have left. Billions.
Increases in SMEs and homeworking. Billions.
Add to this the benefits of better quality of life for billions of people once everyone can get a fit for purpose connection. The money they can save in phone charges, petrol, train tickets, time. The list is endless. What we need is some accurate figures, you are right Tref… policy makers do love stats. Who can give them to us? Crowdsourcing stats. need a hashtag for that. #CrowdSS?

We don’t actually need £29billion, as many urban areas are quite happy with their cabinets for the time being. We just need enough to get a fibre backbone into the areas with demand, the rural hinterlands everyone has ignored. This will also take fibre to the masts, providing decent mobile coverage too. Something that is also sadly lacking and limiting for many businesses whose reps are on the road a lot. Competition is king, and as long as we pander to the monopoly we are always going to be left in the digital slow lane.

The £100Bn is just the return on investment using the same multiplier that was used for the HS2 business case. In other words for every £1 spent on HS2 they say that they will generate £4 of additional boost to the economy.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/05/fixing-us-and-getting-to-higher-gdp.html
“Matching Korea’s Broadband would be a 2.5% GDP boost

Arthur D. Little and Chalmers University of Technology study shows that doubling the broadband speed for an economy increases GDP by 0.3%. A 1000 times increase in broadband speed should mean a 3.0% boost in GDP.

If the US were to build out 1 gigabit per second internet, there should be a one time boost of about 2.5% in GDP.
This would be $375 billion each year and increasing with further GDP increases. The US has an average broadband speed of about 4-5 mbps.”

Can someone with a brain do the sums for the UK?

These GDP numbers are difficult to measure, what did the change from dial-up to ADSL and then ADSL2+ and then FTTC etc. do to the UK GDP? I suspect it’s difficult to measure.

A bit like the statement about loss productivity due to yesterday being a Bank Holiday. The good news is that it’s a leap year…

Anyone who writes this needs to have their thinking looked into:

A 1,000,000,000 times increase in broadband speed should mean a 9.0% boost in GDP.

It’s usage that , existing or potential, that matters. Any links to the actual report?

Quote: “Staffordshire council’s £7.5m to top up the investment in this core communications infrastructure will bring super fast to 90% of residents by 2015 …..”

Although they may be correct in their estimate of additional growth generated, I’ll believe ‘super-fast’ (aka FTTC) will arrive round here when I see it. In this part of Staffs, we are only scheduled to get 21CN by the end of 2012 or early 2013.

The only way it would be achievable is if you categorise ADSL2 as ‘super fast’ and, given the quality of the lines I doubt whether much more than the minimum 2meg will be achievable in some of the rural areas.

Lots of good stuff here already gang. Lets see if we can keep the comments coming – might be able to assemble a compendium of arguments in support of a business case at some stage.

Whether there’s a business case for it, also depends on is there an *application* for it. FTTC gives the majority of people able to get 20Mb+ broadband (often much faster). 20Mb is a lot. It’s enough to stream 5 HDTV channels simultaneously (the most likely scenario I can think of for saturating a 20Mb connection). I can’t think of any current or future application which will require a faster connection than this. Even if we move to cinema resolution TV (UHD) 20Mb will be enough two watch 2 channels, so why spend billions trying to get speeds 4 times faster than we need to everyone, when most people won’t even want it? (in fact take up of BT Infinity is low in it’s own right). However if we leave rolling out fibre for ‘later’, this leaves the odd situation where it may still need to run fibre out to rural areas as a priority over giving city folk “ultra fast” FTTP connections just so those in rural areas can keep up and get the 20Mb+ speeds the city people take for granted. Until we actually need gigabit speeds in our homes (if we ever do) then it’s probably better to sort out the problem areas first. What I’m saying is, we should prioritise getting everyone up to a minimum speed (say 20Mb) over giving a small percentage of people insanely fast gigabit connections they do not yet need.

One of the best analyses of the economic business case in my opinion is the 2008 Plum report “Value of Next Generation Broadband”, commissioned by the Broadband Stakeholder Group, OfCOM and BERR (now BIS). While I have mixed views about the BSG, given that it is a trade body with a high propensity to self interest, I still find the Plum report both comprehensive and informative. Most of the math in the report are beyond my abilities in the subject but the broad conclusions are clear: The benefits accrue in terms of time savings, data security, SME IT, content distribution, reduced business travel and spectrum efficiency. Given that this was written in 2008 I would say that with a 2012 hindsight that is remarkably accurate though it couldn’t possibly have anticipated such things as mobile, apps and social networks not could it have foreseen new business models such as arise from micro payments, 3D printing and personalisation. The costs accrue with the percentage of technology adoption and coverage: which means that if you keep a mixed economy FTTC/FTTH then it’s cheaper than 100% FTTH. However there are variables based on the potential delays in adopting a strategic approach. In other words if we delay a decision to go 100% FTTH we could save money because technology improves or we could lose money because we forfeit the economic growth when compared to our neighbours. The report goes into a number of options for this. The report also looks at the wider social benefits as well as the wider economic benefits and considers things such as social capital, trust, resilience, education, community and informed democracy; these things are hard to value but are equally important. For instance it’s hard to see how localism can support service delivery cost savings without any of the above.
At the time of writing a great deal of the data for the Plum report came from the US; there was little or no hard data in the UK at the time. Given the state of the US FTTH roll out at the moment I find that quite ironic. A 2009 report by S. Derek Turner a researcher for Free Press in the US under the catchy title of “Finding the Bottom Line: The Truth About Network Neutrality & Investment” concluded, amongst other things, that:
• Investment decisions are driven by a variety of factors (well we knew that) but regulation plays only a minor role (well that goes against the commonly received wisdom)
• Network neutrality rules do not deter ISP investment (that’s not what a supplier of significant market power in the UK is telling us)
• At the time of writing most US ISP were actually disinvesting in their networks by depleting more in asset value than they were spending on new capital equipment (I believe we call that sweating assets).
If these 2009 findings hold true (and the full force of the economic meltdown had not been felt at that time) this means that we are witnessing significant lobby pressure both in the UK and in Europe to skew the facts about what drives investment in new networks. My opinion is that such lobby pressure creates uncertainty and where there is uncertainty there is delay and increased cost to cover risk. But that’s just my opinion.
A much more recent study in February of 2012 comes from Sweden: The work by Marco Forzati and Crister Mattsson at Acreo AB which is part of Swedish ICT Research in Stockholm is presented as a “Pre study” entitled “Socio-economic return of FTTH investment in Sweden”. This study is in line with the earlier Plum report in terms of considering the costs of installation and the wider economic benefits to Sweden (Sweden has the advantage that almost nobody lives in the mountains and much of the country is low level coastline with largish population centres) and it concluded that in the first 5 year there would be a 1.5 SEK return for each 1.0 SEK invested. This includes both social and economic returns and the breakeven point comes after 3.5 years though there is a decline in return after 5 years because of the passing impact of the installation process.

Nick, you can’t get 20megabit to the problem areas by any other sensible way other than fibre. Having delivered the infrastructure by fibre, speed is no longer an issue. You can give people 2 meg, 20 meg or 20 gig. Its scaleable. That’s the beauty of doing the job right. Trying to bond copper pairs which often means laying new copper is a complete waste of time and money. Unless you’re a telco seeking to keep everyone tied to an obsolete infrastructure?

cd – where does the money come from to install fibre to every property? That’s the question. What’s the capability of wireless for 20M connections which do not involve expensive digging? TalkTalk change £10/month for FTTC, does not cover much infrastructure.

There is no evidence that BT is seeking to tie everyone to copper, nice soundbite though.

“At the time of writing most US ISP were actually disinvesting in their networks by depleting more in asset value than they were spending on new capital equipment (I believe we call that sweating assets).
If these 2009 findings hold true (and the full force of the economic meltdown had not been felt at that time) this means that we are witnessing significant lobby pressure both in the UK and in Europe to skew the facts about what drives investment in new networks. My opinion is that such lobby pressure creates uncertainty and where there is uncertainty there is delay and increased cost to cover risk. But that’s just my opinion.”

Spot on Paul.

I’d be interested to know whether there is a detailed analysis of projected demand for broadband. I can understand that technical changes make demand difficult to project. But we could at least start by looking at what has happened in recent years to try and understand how demand might continue to grow.

The Officer for National Statistics provides some pointers about how we might think about demand. Internet access continues to grow – in 2011 77% of households had access to the internet at home. That’s an increase of 16% over four years. So, with a UK population of 62.3 million, around 48 million people do have home access to the internet and around 14.3 million people don’t have access to the internet at home. Around half of those people who don’t are exercising personal choice – they say they don’t need or want the internet at home. That leaves 7.15 million people who are potential users.

Before we move on, let’s not write-off those who don’t need or want the internet. That 50% is down from 59% in 2010. The numbers of people who don’t want access are being steadily eroded and if we assume that this process will continue at a modest estimate of 350,000 per year, that’s another 2.8 million users by 2020.

Added to this, the population is growing and that growth is projected to be to 67.2m by 2020. So the projected broadband user population in 2020 might be 51.75m (77% of population) plus 7.7 million potential users representing those who can’t currently get access (adjusted for population growth). Add to this the 2.8 m growth from the steady erosion off households without access. That’s a total of 62.25 million.

On this basis, growth from 48 million home internet users to 62.25 million home users by 2020. That’s a growth of almost 30% in the market.

Thanks Andrew. However what I am after is the delta cash generated by spending more money on giving everyone FTTP. Improvements to rural economy, productivity savings etc.

But is it about giving everyone FTTP? Surely it’s about speed/throughput/load times. FTTP may be the solution now but who knows, there may be a wireless solution about to appear.

If every exchange gets ADSL2+ that will see some gains in rural areas.

Did you ever get some sensible answers on applications for the highest speeds? After 100 years we can now get HD TV over a 10M link so TV is not the killer application.

I’m not worried about what the applications are or are going to be – they will come once the infrastructure is there. Guaranteed.

Don’t know what your rural areas are like somerset, but adsl2+ won’t benefit any of ours in the north, if you can’t get adsl on your line you have even less chance of getting adsl2+.
Going off the figures from Andrew, a 30% growth in internet use must yield some statistics on ROI? Also what Andrew missed out is the fact that a lot of people choose not to engage because their connections are too poor or too expensive (satellites, leased lines etc) and a plan to bring nga would bring another 3 million in who want connections but can’t have one. And once everyone has one, and it works, and its fast, lots more will come on board without having to be dragged kicking and screaming into online centres to tick government boxes for ‘engagement’. People have to see a reason to do something, and there isn’t any point in having a connection if all your family and mates can’t get one, or if it is so slow and frustrating its faster to jump in the car and do things the old analogue way that just works. So what is the ROI for a ubiquitous network? Incalculable methinks. Or this blog hasn’t any brill mathematicians who can work it out for us?

I have business cases garnered during JFDIusa – a trip visiting community networks across the USA. I am still out here but we have numbers now that are across the board. Fttp is not about a single sector ROI. It includes, by its very nature, public sector cost cutting and savings ( and not just on telecoms. Oh no). That number, if you want it, is 1400 homes who were given FTTH 9 months ago have saved $250,000 in that 9 month period alone on telecom services. But that is nothing. Health care, education, citizens, SMEs, productivity, innovation, social well being – all these now have numbers to plug in against the capex of the fibre rollout.

I will be back in UK soon and am armed with so many facts and figures from long established networks many of you may never have heard of. Not the Lafayettes nor Chattanoogas (where I am right now) but under the radar networks run by 3rd generation family firms. Community benefit companies who started to deploy FTTH 12+ yrs ago etc etc.

The business case is proven as long as you don’t try to justify the spend only from a telco point of view because telco 1.0 – the model still widely used – is b0rked, ineffectual and irrelevant.

There is enormous opportunity to leverage technology to fundamentally change the way we work, to drive down cost and improve service delivery. Implementing smarter ways of working can open up other opportunities including making better use of accommodation, an area where local government could potentially save £7bn per year according to a recent report.
source: http://publicsectornomads.com/mobilelocalgov/
so just the savings here could pay back in three years? and this is just one area… surely someone reading this blog can add it all up? And don’t forget to add in the income from the network itself. It will knock the spots off any other offering on the market.

Is it significant that half the UK already has access to 100Mb from VM etc. and 100% has access to any speed at a cost?

So we are half way there, or am I missing something…

” 1400 homes who were given FTTH 9 months ago have saved $250,000 in that 9 month period alone on telecom services.” – just under $20 per month. By “given” do we mean free FTTH ? In any case this would be a reduction in GDP, wouldn’t it ?

James seems a bit low on households – http://media.ofcom.org.uk/facts/ says 18.4m fixed residential connections and elsewhere that this is 67% takeup so 27.5m households. Taking his 90% that’s 24.75m to pass at a cost of $18.6bn plus 16.6m subscribers to connect at $9.9bn total $28.5 bn which in real world purchasing power is £28.5 bn which is the number we started with. For a positive NPV on the infrastructure we probably need to see £2.85bn of return per year to the “investor” which is £14.30 per month per subscriber.

Are we trying to find increases in GDP to put against the investment ? Helping the rural economy to the detriment of the urban one may be a hard sell, unless the urban loser is in India.

PhilT – interesting that you analyse statements, $250k sounds impressive until you do the sums, hopefully Lyndsey will explain what they were paying before and after for what and to whom.

If you say you are creating a saving in something – please define it. There is nothing defined here. How will we save money in Healthcare?

Every study carried out on working from home shows that it increases costs and reduces effectiveness of organisations (MIT/Sloan, Harvard and others).

Also there are 28M homes in the UK. (The last census for England and Wales was on 27 March 2011 and involved around 25 million households.)

The deployment method for FIOS is not one that would work well in the UK (and I think you should look at what people pay in real terms for FIOS and other broadband services ). Fibre to the mast won’t help if there is no spectrum and we are fast pushing against Shannon’s Law in the frequencies that are suitable for mobile deployment.

What drives new investment in networks is one of two things: 1: We can make money from it. 2: We can save money from it (which is really 1 in disguise).

There is no hold onto copper inside BT, an all fibre network would make the network massively more simpler to operate. But even with this and the other benefits the case doesn’t cost in because ultimately users don’t want to pay a lot of money for broadband. (See how much 20m costs you in the US) the UK is massively cheaper than nearly every market in the world for broadband and has the most competitive space with hundreds of ISP’s selling broadband services, thats not true in many other markets. Find out how many markets can get 76M for around £26 a month. So I deploy fibre and you get 100M but its costs you over £200 a month? OK so maybe you reply 300M over fibre – but then why do I need it? The vast majority of people don’t. And it doesn’t come free, you need PON’s and WDM optics and you need the ability to terminate higher speeds inside your house. Tell me how many routers can do more than 100M? I can tell you that to do 100M properly requires a box thats well over £1000 I have heavily tested this with a multiscreen video platform in my own house. (oh and yes they all say they have a 1G port! none of them come close!).

Then nobody has factored in the core network costs or interconnect costs or the platform costs for the applications providers who would need a large step up in deployment capability in order to cope with a 10 fold increase in bandwidth.

For years I had a 1G link to my house and I am a heavy network user in a family of heavy network users. Never once did the line peak above 150M and the average utilisation was well below 80M.

Neil.

What I’ve not seen much of is

Benefits of just FTTC, yes its not the best technical solution, but with a small amount e.g. 5% of FTTP to the EO/2km D side crowd, what are the economic benefits?

For the extra money that FTTP is, how much extra would be generated?

Also with all these promises of extra jobs, does this mean full employment if every county does it. Or are these jobs by one county attracting firms from another county, i.e. it is just moving jobs around.

As Europe is upgrading too, then business may just sit tight and not move at all.

Neil.
We save money in healthcare by reducing the analogue paperwork, which is massive. Online appointments. Telemedicine. Virtual consultants. Monitoring. – endless list.

An all fibre network would be much cheaper to operate. Thus prices need not rise.

The UK is cheap because many ISPs sell a throttled and contended service and cap users too. There is no point in upgrading to faster speeds or they will use the allowance even faster, hence ‘homes passed’ is the monopoly’s marketing ploy, not ‘homes connected’.

We can’t grow as a digital nation if we hold fast to the scarcity model. It isn’t just about speed, its about having the capability for speed, a modern infrastructure that can deliver better and cheaper and keep us in the game.

I think you have exaggerated the cost of home routers, many can do wifi at 300 megabit now and are sub £100. Community networks all over the states are using them.

How many years ago did you have your 1gig link? Do you work for BT?
Was the line throttled, capped and contended like everyone else’s is?

Cyberdoyle,
Not sure that all your data is accurate I’m afraid,

Just for the record:
I was a founding member at Demon Internet in 1992, I had the very first DSL line in the UK in 1994 to my house in Finchley back to the Demon Finchley NOC. I worked at Easynet and then COLT for 10 years running Network Engineering, I put in over 25000km of fibre to over ten thousands buildings around the Europe and the US.

I then worked at C&W for 4 years responsible for Network Engineering, and I am now Chief Network Architect at BT for the past year. I’ve also been a non-exec director at the London Internet Exchange for over 10 years.

Lets take your healthcare example. When I was working at C&W we ran the NHS email platform (the biggest Microsoft Exchange platform in the world I may add (according to MS)). I can tell you that you could run that whole platform off a __single__ gigabit ethernet link. So how does having fibre to everyones home save us money in healthcare?! The capability we have today is _already_ saving the healthcare industry billions. Will faster speeds save it more? I strongly believe that those savings would be marginal if any, perhaps if 3D remote robotic surgery became a reality it might save money but I think we’re more than a few years off that requirement.

Sky, Talktalk and BT offer _today_ an unlimited service for between roughly 3 pounds up to 25 pounds depending on the service (ADSL2+, SFBB).

The UK is cheap because we have real competition.

Typically networks are built to usage + however long it takes to add more capacity and _not_ contention ratios using UCL and LCL methodolgies.

The US is expensive because 1: It costs _alot_ of money to connect houses, 2: There is no competition.

There are also massive areas inside the US that can only get ADSL1 and massive areas that don’t even have that and use satellite which we all know is not really a good medium for Internet. The same is true in nearly every country rolling out broadband services.

I had the 1G link 4 years ago, it was not throttled in any way it was not a BT line.

With regards to the routers you have just believed the marketing hype of the router manufacturers!
Of all the devices I tested with 300M 802.11N only one was capable of delivering 300M if there was only _one_ user on the router and to keep that stream running at 300M required me to seriously hack the wifi driver on my laptop and literally stand right next to the AP using 5GHz. They do not deliver. Even with a wired connection none of the routers you can buy that are sub £100 can do 1G at a sustained rate with features. Most of them can’t do it even without features. Based on what I’ve found I am sure the communities you refer to get on average no more than 20-30M each, which is half of what FTTC can deliver today. And homes passed actually means if those people phone up and wanted SFBB they could have it. The homes are connected already.

Regards,
Neil.

Your original post asked what value will FTTP deliver in x pounds of benefit for every additional pound spent by BDUK on NGA. Well I can give you the numbers for Derbyshire as published in the Digital Derbyshire Plan.

Over the next 10 years the £7.39M BDUK funding for Derbyshire (plus £1.056M from the council) aims to deliver:
 An additional 3042 jobs across Derbyshire
 Net increase of £207m in GVA per annum
 A cost benefit ratio on public investment of 73:1

Extrapolate this by 80 or so counties and unitary authorities and you’re looking at a return of £17b GVA per annum and 250,000 new jobs!

Now if my bank offered a return of 73:1 on an investment I’d be asking what’s the catch? Well the catch with this kind of formula is that much of the benefits are intangible, the financials are notional and the old adage applies – if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

For Derbyshire the beneficiaries of BDUK investment will be the businesses and residents in 188,043 premises (over 40% of the county) that will otherwise be left behind by the failure of commercial NGA to be universally rolled out. Of these 25,992 premises are getting less than 2mb/s, but what is the real value of all that extra bandwidth? I reckon its a lot less than Derbyshire’s project claims.

BDUK projects must do much more with the money than simply gap fund commercial failure of the legacy telcos. That’s why I really hope that the more innovative independent ISPs like Timico Group get a chance to be involved in the delivery of regional BDUK projects like this as well as influencing National policy.

Thanks Richard. These are very impressive returns but what I’m after is specifically what the investment in FTTP would yield. Are not the BDUK numbers are based on FTTC and 2Megs to the last 10%?

Tref, the funding model developed for BDUK grants is supposed to be technology-neutral but the Derbyshire project assumes deployment of both FTTC and FTTP options, plus wireless and satellite infill options for areas (> 1.5km from cabinets) which will remain sub 2Mbp/s. Given the terrain, achieving this will be challenging but definitely worth doing.

To answer Neil’s point, I agree that it is virtually impossible to put a real numeric value on benefits such as social and digital inclusion. The real issue here is the economic cost of NOT having decent broadband coverage (the point made by Cyberdoyle on 6th June). Businesses and home workers will eventually relocate, and startups will go elsewher while the remaining rural communities will be left increasingly isolated as they wrestle with the limitations of their 3G dongles!

Richard – Anyone who publishes ‘An additional 3042 jobs across Derbyshire’ needs to consider what business they are in. How do you come up with such an exact figure and how will you measure it?

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