UK Government Unveils Bidders for £10m Broadband Innovation Fund

The Government’s £10 million Innovation Fund, which aims to “test innovative solutions to deliver superfast broadband services to the most difficult to reach areas” (i.e. the final rural 5% of the United Kingdom), has today announced a list of the successful bidders and the nature of the pilot schemes they have proposed.

The fund, which unlike the national Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) scheme has also made itself open to bids from fixed wireless, mobile broadband and satellite broadband providers, is often viewed as a more accessible alternative to the troubled £20m Rural Community Broadband Fund (RCBF).

So far 8 different projects have been shortlisted to progress to the “feasibility stage“, ahead of deployments starting later this year. Each will not only experiment with different technologies but will also explore a “social investment financial model” and an operating model that “aggregates small rural networks, to ensure no-one is left behind in the digital slow lane“.

Each proposal can only be used to cover “basic broadband white areas, instead of all NGA white areas” and there appears to be a £3.3m funding cap on individual tenders (i.e. the maximum amount any one supplier can win). However all of the bids (listed further below) appear to come in well below the cap.

Culture Secretary, Sajid Javid, said:

“Our nationwide rollout is progressing at a terrific rate and each week superfast speeds are becoming a reality for tens of thousands of homes and businesses in rural areas across the UK. We know how important this has become which is why we are investing £10m in these pilots to explore how we can extend coverage beyond the 95% of the UK we are on track to deliver by 2017.”

Malcolm Corbett, CEO of INCA, said:

“This is a very useful initiative and we are keen to help local authorities and INCA members learn from the trials. There is a huge amount of experience, professionalism and entrepreneurial enthusiasm in the independent sector that can play a big role in creating Britain’s future digital infrastructure.”

The £10m Innovation Fund Bids

1. AB Internet (Wales – Wireless) £847,650
A hybrid fixed line/fixed wireless superfast rural broadband network. All services on the proposed pilot network will be delivered via an end to end network and will deliver end user speeds of up to 50Mb.

2. Airwave (North Yorkshire – Wireless) £1,564,600
Demonstrating how four next-generation wireless systems will operate in the field. The four are: Wi-Fi at 2.4Ghz, point-to-multipoint broadband fixed wireless access at 2.4Ghz or 5.8Ghz, LTE small cells and TV white space.

3. Quickline (North Lincolnshire – Wireless) £2,054,000
Testing a range of line of sight, near line of sight and non-line of site technologies combined with a BDUK funded voucher scheme to maximise early uptake and avoid social exclusion. Strong focus on the Isle of Axholme, which is due to be ready to connect its first homes by January 2015 (the first businesses should benefit even earlier – Nov 2014).

4. Avanti (Northern Ireland and Scotland – Satellite) £885,640
Piloting a new superfast satellite broadband wholesale platform across the UK to deliver a 30Mbps service to the final 5% using its Ka-band satellites.

5. Satellite Internet (Devon and Somerset – Satellite) £175,125
Using KA-band satellite uplink/downlink as backhaul for local wireless networks and directly to customer premise equipment.

6. Call Flow (Hampshire – Mixed [Fibre, fixed wireless, sub-loop unbundling]) £1,194,145
Testing a range of innovative ‘hybrid’ engineering techniques/solutions to achieve NGA delivery such as: sub loop unbundling of cabinets, building a significant fibre network that connects as many of the deployed ‘SLU node areas’ together as possible, NGA delivery using fixed wireless access and fibre to the premise (FTTP).

7. Cybermoor (Northumberland – Financial model) £449,997
Developing a financing solution to leverage social investment into fibre to the premise and wireless networks in the last 5%.

8. MLL (Kent – Operating model) £957,900
Creating a common wholesale OSS/BSS platform for integrating / aggregating rural wireless networks. In addition integrate an existing rural network to allow it to be provided wholesale to other operators / ISPs and deploy a new Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) network.

Most of the solutions mentioned above have already been tried in different places around the country but it’s good to see that the list consists entirely of alternatives to BT’s approach and there are some interesting approaches, such as Airwave’s next-gen wireless plan and Quickline’s BDUK funded voucher scheme.

All of these efforts are good news but they still represent a drop in the ocean and it remains to be seen whether any of these approaches will in the future secure more funding for greater coverage.

UPDATE 30th June 2014

Added a little extra detail to Quickline’s project above.