IET – Combining Tech and Mobile Spectrum Could Fix UK Rural Broadband

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IEF) will next week host a Rural Broadband Debate that will look at current government policy and propose a solution for bringing “reasonable” broadband access to the most remote communities at a “reasonable” price, which could involve combining technologies and greater mobile spectrum sharing between network operators.

The debate, which is set to take place on Tuesday 10th June (from 9am – 12noon) at Broadway House (Tothill Street, London, SW1H 9NQ), is to be attended by various experts from the fibre optic, wireless and satellite industries, including representatives from BT (Gary Miller) and Vodafone (Matthew Braovac) as well as Shadow Cabinet Office Minister, Chi Onwurah MP.

Others making up the panel will include Kumar Singarajah of Avanti Communications, Giorgio Tarchi from Eutelsat and Matt Yardley of Analysys Mason.

Professor Will Stewart, from the IET, said:

“There are a number of possible solutions to deal with the lack of broadband service in many rural areas. The IET has looked at this and argues that it is about a smart network being attentive to the customer’s needs and combining the technologies and end-to-end infrastructure together to meet them. In doing this we can reduce costs while extending the reach and speed of internet access to rural areas.

Examples could include mobile phone companies sharing phone masts and frequency spectrum, leading to significant cost reductions with improved service to customers. Such user-demand-attentive smart systems could improve reach in rural areas without excessive cost.”

The introduction for the event notes that fixed line “super-fast broadband” (24Mbps+) is already being rolled out across the country (aims to reach 95% by 2017 and 99% by 2018 with wireless/mobile), although it points out that this has so far mostly focused upon “those who already had a reasonable DSL service” (i.e. urban and suburban style areas).

In fairness, the Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) programme is now slowly starting to move into a growing number of rural communities and this will of course rise the closer we get to that 95% figure. As for solutions, the debate’s introduction doesn’t attempt to define what a “reasonable” broadband service might be and no doubt the Satellite reps will be keen to avoid tricky issues like usage allowances and latency.

It’s also unclear what the IET means by its very general description of a combined network (technically all Internet linked networks are already combined) and most mobile operators are already sharing spectrum networks to cut costs and improve coverage, although there may be scope for going further but ultimately somebody somewhere still has to build it.

Suffice to say that the debate should be interesting, although we would have liked to see representatives from some rural altnet providers and or related rural communities.