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UPDATE ISP Kijoma Says BT NGA Broadband Overbuild Wastes Public Money

Friday, May 1st, 2015 (8:44 am) - Score 2,730

Part of the problem stems from those state aid rules, which initially allowed BDUK to effectively exclude wireless providers from being considered as true NGA operators unless they agreed “a commitment to replace non-wired connections with fibre at a later stage” (here). The position, which Lewis calls “stupid and unworkable“, wasn’t popular with FWA ISPs and meant that some councils simply marked areas that had been covered by related providers as “not spots“, even though they weren’t.

The problem is well demonstrated by a comment that was made to Lewis in response to a Q&A session with the WSCC during 2010, which formed part of a question the leader event and reveals the local authority’s early and rather unusual approach towards defining “not spots“.

Mike Hicks, WSCC’s IT, Economic and Communities Boss (2010), said:

My view of “not-spot” is that strictly speaking there is nowhere in the UK (or for that matter Western Europe) that has no coverage for broadband. It is possible (although potentially very expensive) to access a broadband service by satellite, wireless or Ethernet absolutely everywhere. In my interpretation, I have taken that a not-spot is any location where there is no open access, reasonably priced service provided.

Broadband speeds of less than 2Mbps should probably be included in the definition but I have created the phrase “not-a-lot spots” for those areas. In the case of the non-ADSL exchanges, I accept that Kijoma has coverage in those areas and that the prices are appropriate. However, a closed access service does make these locations, in my view, “not-spots” by the definition I am using.”

Admittedly very few FWA providers offer a truly open access network, which is a requirement for securing state aid funding, and this has hindered the ability of some smaller rivals to gain funding.

But most fixed wireless operators run off a commercial model and so this particular aspect is arguably not nearly as much of a problem as the prior rejection of NGA status, which effectively allows BT to overbuild because the councils don’t recognise anybody else as being present.

Conversely some anecdotal evidence from residents in the affected areas suggests that the council, at the same time as ignoring Kijoma’s existence on its maps, may still be using the wireless ISP as an excuse for not investing.

Lewis claims that several people who enquired with WSCC about the possibility of bringing fibre broadband to their area were allegedly told that they could not have fibre under BDUK because “there is another service available” (i.e. in this case implying that Kijoma operated in their area).

Bill Lewis continued:

If you speak to WSCC they will mumble about the lack of post code information from us at the last [Open Market Review (OMR)], what they will not say is that during the previous OMR’s we provided our coverage and when it came to them publishing the results of the OMR, the maps had none of our coverage shown on it, not even for “basic” broadband.

We had to raise this with them, they then took the maps down and never replaced them. We refused to provide some information at the last OMR due to the backdrop of clear overbuild from the earlier OMR data and a refusal to register Kijoma’s existence in the county with BDUK.”

The situation is not a million miles from the stance that B4RN took after Lancashire County Council seemed unwilling to de-scope their planned coverage from the BDUK based contract with BT. In that case B4RN was even deploying a pure fibre optic network, which is what was being recommended for future upgrades.

Since then B4RN and other altnet providers have found it increasingly counter-productive to engage with local authorities and instead prefer to simply focus on beating BT at its own game, by delivering a superior service. In B4RN’s case the community-built nature of their network encourages strong uptake, but other providers will remain vulnerable.

The good news is that BDUK’s future Phase 3 roll-out, which should focus on improving connectivity to the final 5%, looks likely to be even more accepting of fixed wireless ISPs (several of the preliminary pilots are wireless-based solutions) and this may make such operators harder to ignore; assuming any future Government doesn’t do a U-turn. But that will do little to help Kijoma and similar ISPs because by the time BDUK enters its third deployment phase the damage may have already been done.

One upside to all of this is that consumers will benefit from a greater choice of ISP, although it’s difficult to know how long that will last unless the use of public funding starts to be managed more constructively. In an ideal world the public funding would be better used serving similar areas where no NGA suppliers of any sort exist.

It should be said that BT aren’t strictly to blame here, they’re a big commercial company that will understandably use any opportunity to grow. As such it comes down to the local authority and Government to ensure that their rules are effective enough to tackle such problems without allowing the overbuild of viable private competitors.

In the course of writing this article we did contact WSCC for a comment, but so far they have yet to furnish us with a response and we will update once one arrives.

UPDATE 7th May 2015

After a week of waiting, largely due to the bank holiday, we now have the official statement from WSCC.

West Sussex County Council’s Statement to ISPreview.co.uk

West Sussex County Council is investing in broadband infrastructure for the purpose of meeting the government’s target of coverage by ‘superfast’ broadband of 95% of the UK by 2017.

The area that is eligible for public funding is informed by the Open Market Review (OMR) and subsequent State Aid Consultation which took place in the autumn of 2012. In the review we asked all telecommunications suppliers in the county to provide us in confidence with information about their current and planned (up to three years) broadband services in West Sussex.

This exercise was carried out in accordance with European Union regulations and as part of the central government procurement framework as set out and managed by BDUK (Broadband Delivery UK, the government department responsible for broadband policy).

We invited Kijoma to respond to the OMR and were supplied with a picture showing an area of coverage drawn onto a map. This was not supported by details at a postcode level of premises for which their service met the technology guidelines for an NGA broadband service, or any information of sufficient detail to allow us to assess with due diligence their current or future plans for services.

As part of our State Aid consultation, we published mapping without reference to Kijoma as we were not able to detail their coverage. In subsequent correspondence with Kijoma we took a view that we would acknowledge their coverage within our mapping of ‘basic’ broadband, which was published online in January 2013.

We have heard since from communities who have challenged Kijoma’s declared coverage of areas where a wireless supply of broadband is not available.

We carried out a second OMR to re-map the area eligible for funding made available from the ‘superfast extension fund’. We again invited Kijoma to take part but again did not receive sufficient detail from them either to our request for coverage information, or to the mapping that we subsequently published for further State Aid consultation.

West Sussex has three of the four non digitally-enabled exchanges in the UK. It is necessarily part of our roll out of improved infrastructure to upgrade all three exchange areas due to the fact that no credible evidence was provided by any network operators of qualifying NGA broadband infrastructure including Kijoma’s.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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