UPDATE ISP Kijoma Says BT NGA Broadband Overbuild Wastes Public Money

Ordinarily the news that BT is bringing fibre optic broadband (FTTC/P) cables to your area would be welcome. But it’s not always so and sometimes the use of public money to help upgrade the smallest of UK rural areas, especially when a “superfast” (24Mbps+) capable provider is already serving local customers, can raise concerns.

At present the Government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme is throwing around £1.7bn of public money, primarily in BT’s direction, in order to ensure that fixed line superfast broadband speeds reach 95% of the county by 2017/18. So far the progress has been good but it hasn’t always been without controversy, particularly with regards to overbuilding.

In fact there have been a number of incidents where the deployment programme has been accused of wasting money by allowing BT to roll-out into areas that are already covered or in the process of being covered by other Next Generation Access (NGA) providers, such as part of B4RN’s network in Lancashire (example) or Gigaclear in Wiltshire (example).

Europe’s State Aid Rules are designed to prevent such problems from occurring (though some overbuild around the edges is considered acceptable), although the implementation can be very bureaucratic and more than a few councils could be accused of having turned a blind eye to the good work that some alternative network operators are doing (note: often without any recourse to public funding).

A more complicated example is that of Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) providers, such a VFast, Kijoma, Relish and many more. Some of these ISPs are able to provide flexible data allowances, better than superfast speeds and low latency connections for affordable prices over wide areas, but they’ve also been largely shunned by a number of local authorities.

Take for example the situation that Kijoma currently claims to be experiencing in West Sussex (England), where they note that BT have been building fibre optic cables towards Hooksway, a remote hamlet of 4 properties. Elsewhere BT’s fibre also appears to be running from East Marden village all the way down the single track road, about 1.5 miles, towards Stoughton. Various other surrounding areas may also benefit from BT’s mix of ‘up to’ 80Mbps FTTC and some patches with 330Mbps FTTP.

Another area is Sutton Parish in Sussex, where BT’s deployment is predicted to involve 1 FTTC street cabinet and the rest FTTP for perhaps 3 hamlets + 1 other village and those beyond the reach of the cab.

The problem here is that Kijoma already covers many of these areas with wireless broadband speeds of up to 30-40Mbps (e.g. Sutton, Bignor, Barlavington, East/North/Up Marden, Chilgrove etc.) and they have a number of live customers, with take-up in some of their locations reaching as high as 96%.

Bill Lewis, MD of Kijoma, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“I am not looking to be seen as the whiny competitor trying to preserve their revenues. Instead I feel the public need to see for themselves that significant parts of West Sussex in particular have gone without, mainly areas where the residents/businesses have no choice of Kijoma, ADSL at anything approaching 2Mbps or even 3G/4G etc.

The evidence is very strong that the money has been used predominately to overbuild Kijoma’s coverage and customer base. I.e. people and businesses with existing superfast connections, the majority of which have declared strongly that they do not want to change ISP, many of which use VoIP and have no desire to go back to Line rental and restrictive services either.

If you had Broadband at £17.99 and didn’t have to pay ~£16.99 line rental then I expect you would be reluctant to change too as it basically makes your Broadband £1 a month compared to BT , let alone the lack of minimum call charges, entirely free voip to voip calls and the mass of other features VoIP provides.

These areas also involve the most construction work and will have to be predominately FTTP in nature due to a lack of cabinets and a sprawled out population. BT flatly refused to fit ADSL to two exchanges in these areas on the basis of viability.”

The cost of digging pure fibre optic cables into the ground or slinging them over telegraph poles is far from cheap, especially when it comes to the arduous task of having to connect up individual properties, and as such it’s important to ensure that the public money goes towards those who need it the most. Clearly this may not always be happening. More over the page..