ASK4 COO Says Yorkshire Digital Region Network Needs Credible BT Alternative

Q2. Earlier this year Ask4 made the decision to acquire the customers of defunct ISP RiPWiRE, which suddenly ceased trading on 1st February 2012 after a spate of “commercial and technical issues” with the financially troubled Digital Region network in South Yorkshire. What first prompted Ask4 to snap up RiPWiRE’s customer base and was this an easy process?

ANSWER:

We are a Sheffield based business and inherently we want the local region to do well. Seeing the potential knock on impact of RiPWiRE leaving the Digital Region network, both on its customer base and on the wider DRL project, we felt it was right for someone to step in and help.

It wasn’t an easy process at all for us to take this on, there was limited commercial benefit for us and technologically integrating the customers into our systems was no small amount of work for our development and network teams. Hopefully for the vast majority of customers though their transition was pretty painless.

Q3. What are your thoughts on the continuing and well publicised financial woes of the Digital Region network, which now looks set to hand its management over to either BTWholesale or ETDE SA (depending upon the outcome of their current tender)?

ANSWER:

In short it’s a shame.

We want Digital Region to be a success for the local region and to offer a credible alternative to the standard BT product set. There have been many well-documented problems with the Digital Region project, from the high costs associated with leaving the service, the lack of automation for signup to many of the technical problems that users faced up until very recently.

The biggest issue though is that Digital Region does not carry a cost that makes it competitive with the rest of the market. Currently the model is best suited to Businesses and high-end users (this is where we see our customers coming from), but this is a niche market and is not going to bring in the numbers that Digital Region stakeholders would like to see, or need to see for the project to be self-financing. We would have also liked to have seen a rollout of the network that started with those users in mind, rather than targeting the areas where Internet take-up is low and where the cost of subscription is a very real barrier.

Digital Region themselves have made much of the fact that there are no big-name ISPs offering services and have attributed many of the failings of the project on this fact. We believe that a good starting point for Digital Region would be to look at why this is the case and why Digital Region doesn’t fit into traditional ISP models, and then work with the existing providers in shaping a wholesale product that answers those questions.

Q4. The UK government’s Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) plan, which aims to make superfast broadband (25Mbps+) services available to 90% of the country by 2015, has recently faced criticism from both the European Commission (EC) and a House of Lords Select Committee Inquiry.

Both the EC and Lords inquiry appear concerned at the lack of competition in the BDUK tenders, with only BT and Fujitsu allowed to bid; Fujitsu has already withdrawn from several projects and smaller ISPs seem to have been economically excluded.

Related concerns have also been raised over the speed target (25Mbps+ vs the EU’s 30Mbps+) and lack of open access to Dark Fibre lines. What are your thoughts on these concerns and the state of the government’s current broadband strategy?

ANSWER:

Whilst any plan to increase the availability of faster services is commendable, the current plan falls short on a number of areas. Firstly it is focused very much on short-term gains in speeds, a pessimist might say that was simply in order to climb places on International league tables. The plan does not take into consideration the challenges and requirements of an ever more connected society in the next 10 years.

Smart Cities, Telemedicine, Home-working, the ever-growing array of media over the Internet and countless other innovations will continue to change our lives and the way that we interact over the Internet in the future. We need to be putting in place the infrastructure that allows us to adapt to these new demands, that is not where we are currently headed.

Secondly it is still focused on the 90%. For the UK to be truly competitive in the coming years it needs to be pushing for 100% coverage, mixing fibre and wireless technologies to ensure that we reach everyone and on a relatively level playing field, i.e. not settling for 2Mb, at best, for those in rural areas.