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Government to Start Rural Pilot of Free Broadband Satellite Subsidy

Wednesday, Sep 16th, 2015 (8:15 am) - Score 6,054

As expected the Government has announced that they’re launching a pilot of their proposed subsidy (voucher) scheme to support the installation of “superfast” (24Mbps+) capable Satellite broadband services in remote rural areas, which will begin this month in Suffolk and West Yorkshire (England).

The idea was first officially touted as part of the original Budget 2015 (March) announcement (here), with the approach being that related vouchers would cover the cost of both the services installation (normally £100 to £150) and hardware (can be anything from £200 to £600), but you’d still have to pay for the monthly rental (from £24.99).

The subsidy scheme, which will be extended across the United Kingdom from December 2015, will typically only be available to remote parts of the country where the wider fixed-line focused Broadband Delivery UK programme has so far been unable to reach via BT or other upgrades.

At present BDUK is predominantly working with BT, as well as a small number of other ISPs (e.g. Gigaclear), to push superfast broadband connectivity out via fixed line services to 95% of the UK by 2017/18. Meanwhile a plan to reach the final 5% is due to be unveiled soon, although the Satellite subsidy is expected to focus upon the very last 1-2% of premises (alternative fixed line or wireless solutions may be used to fill the other 3% or so).

Ed Vaizey, Communications Minister, said (Telegraph):

More than 83pc of the UK can already access superfast speeds, and over the next two years we will reach 95pc of the country with superfast broadband. As superfast roll out progresses, we promised every home would be able to access speeds of at least two megabits per second by the end of this year. These pilot schemes are part of our commitment to delivering this.”

The subsidy scheme appears to be focused upon helping the Government to achieve their somewhat out-of-date Universal Service Commitment (USC), which aims to ensure that everybody can gain access to a broadband download speed of at least 2Mbps by 2016. Interestingly BDUK states that their USC has a total budget of £60m, which is possibly the first time that we’ve seen such a figure confirmed.

We say out-of-date because most reports, including Ofcom, now appear to support 10Mbps as a minimum speed and the USC has also historically always failed to factor in the importance of both upload speeds and latency to modern connections.

At the same time the non-binding USC seems to be in conflict with the “superfast” goal, particularly since Europe wants 100% to have access to 30Mbps by 2020. Not to mention the plan for reviewing whether or not he UK should adopt a legally binding USO of 5Mbps (this was also announced in the budget).

Apparently the subsidy scheme will be available from any one of four participating Satellite ISPs and at least one of those has promised a service that’s capable of 30Mbps, which will probably mirror the same product offered by Avonline as part of an earlier pilot in N.Ireland and Scotland (here).

In that pilot customers paid £24.99 per month to get 10Mbps (2Mbps upload) with a usage allowance of just 20GB and if you wanted the 30Mbps option (6Mbps uploads), complete with a 40GB allowance, then that actually increased to a hefty £49.99 per month.

However the Government will need to tread carefully here because Satellite solutions are not particularly well rated for service or support quality and many such platforms have a poor history of performance (example), often due to capacity constraints or excessive speed throttling (particularly at peak times).

The high cost of data is another hindrance, as are the poor latency times that make such connectivity useless for fast paced services like multiplayer gaming or mission critical financial trades (it doesn’t exactly help VPN or VoIP calls either). See our article – Satellite Might Not be the Best Fix. It’s a quick-fix, but as a long-term solution it’s much harder to sell.

On the other hand the cost of reaching many of those in that final 1-2% would be so disproportionately expensive that it quickly becomes a very challenging problem to resolve, particularly when the country is still sitting on a mountain of Government debt that in Q1 2015 stood at £1.56 trillion (paying off the annual interest on that alone costs £43bn). The economy might be growing, but it’s still a bit like balancing on a tightrope over a pit of the sharpest spikes.. one gust of wind is all it takes.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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