Yesterday the government announced its ambition to deliver a Digital Hub to almost every community in the country, which it claimed would be at the heart of their £830 million strategy to make sure that the "UK has the best broadband network in Europe by 2015" (here). But just what do they mean by Digital Hub?

The concept sounds, at least for now, similar to that of a community owned Digital Village Pump (DVP), which has been pioneered by ISPs like Fibrestream ( NextGenUs ) and a few others, to help bring fibre optic broadband connectivity to rural towns and villages. A hub is not unlike a small local telephone exchange, albeit often almost exclusively focused on digital / internet connectivity.

In essence, a fibre optic cable is carried from a reliable backhaul source outside of town and dug all the way into the village, where it connects inside a small building (DVP) to manage the areas various premise (home / business) connections. Premises can then be individually connected by digging a direct fibre optic link ( Fibre-to-the-Home ( FTTH )), or the service could even be distributed over wireless (e.g. Wi-Fi , WiMAX etc.); sometimes called FiWi (Fibre Wireless).

This certainly sounds a lot like what the government proposed yesterday when it said that, "The hubs will act as central digital points in each community, with high speed connections to the nearest exchange and communities working with local providers to extend networks to individual homes".


We adore the idea of giving communities control over managing or even "extending the network to individual homes,," as one government quote said yesterday. We also support the principal of extending networks over time to "provide enhanced access to broadband for individual premises in a variety of ways", which is again similar to the original DVP idea.

However the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at business ISP Timico UK, Trefor Davies, recently claims to have confirmed that the governments 'Digital Hub' idea could also be twisted to include Fibre-to-the-Cabinet ( FTTC ) technology, which BT is already busy rolling out to 66% of the country by 2015.


FTTC delivers a fast fibre optic cable to BT's street level cabinets, while the remaining connection (between cabinets and homes) is done using VDSL2 (similar to current ADSL broadband but faster over short distances) via existing copper cable; FTTC can deliver speeds of up to 40Mbps, rising to 60Mbps in the future (uploads can reach up to 10-15Mbps). However future DSL enhancements could go a lot further.

Despite what some people might say, FTTC is not a bad solution and makes a lot of sense at a time when money is tight and ISPs are looking to keep pace with growing consumer demands at the minimum possible cost. However the VDSL2 part of this setup does still suffer, not unlike existing ADSL / ADSL2+ broadband, from performance loss over distance on copper lines.

Some consumers could find themselves with sub-15Mbps speeds on FTTC, which in fairness is significantly better than 0.5Mbps or 1Mbps and should be welcomed, but it's not as future proof as true FTTH and would fall well below the EU's 30Mbps minimum target for 2020. Likewise this could effectively mean calling BT's street cabinets "Digital Hubs", which are not usually open to control, management and future enhancement by communities. This conflicts with the government's proposal.

In fairness it's still far too early to tell how this will play out in the real world and, like it or not, this is the direction that the government has chosen to take. Isolated consumers will at least be pleased to know that they haven't been forgotten and the majority do stand to benefit, in most cases significantly, under what has been proposed. But as always, the devil could still be hiding in the detail.