FISP Calls for 1000Mbps Broadband to be Deployed Across London UK

The Foundation for Information Society Policy (FISP) think-tank has said that some 20 cities in the United Kingdom are on their way to rolling out Gigabit (1000Mbps+) class broadband services, but London isn’t one of them and they want the capital’s mayoral candidates to change that.

In fairness even many of the cities that do have 1Gbps broadband connectivity available often only deliver very limited consumer coverage of such connections (e.g. the Sky Broadband and TalkTalk Joint Venture with Cityfibre in York does intend to cover the whole city, but so far they’ve only actually achieved a few thousand “premises passed” since 2014).

Lest we not forget that most of the Gigabit class connections in other cities are more focused upon catering for public sector and business sites, but if we only look at those then you also have to include Leased Lines and they are much more widely available, albeit for a hefty install price.

However FISP seems more concerned with the consumer angle and they note a YouGov survey of 1,167 adults in London, which claims that a sixth of Londoners are unhappy with their broadband speed (the possible network availability of faster connections in related areas does not appear to have been considered in the survey) and 17% rate the city’s chances of meeting future broadband needs as being very poor.

David Brunnen, FISP Member, said:

“Demand for broadband capacity in London is growing rapidly, but the capital’s broadband, based largely on old networks of copper wires, has a limited future. This dangerous situation will diminish economic and societal growth in the future, unless London’s incoming mayor is able and willing to take drastic action.

Slow broadband has a particularly negative impact on those who are trying to work flexibly from home, and on small businesses and start-ups based in people’s homes and reliant on speedy internet to run successful operations.

Hundreds of thousands of Londoners are already unhappy with their broadband – and unless quick action is taken to support growth and encourage investment, there will be serious repercussions in the near future.”

FISP says that to solve this problem the future London mayor should deliver a publicly-owned Digital for Londoners (DfL) agency, which would dedicate itself towards making London an “open access” based Gigabit City by 2020 (defined as allowing all homes and businesses a symmetrical broadband speed of 1000Mbps). But as usual it’s all too easy for a think-tank to promise such things, but quite another to fund and then delivery such a project within what is a very tight time-scale.

In theory Virgin Media’s future DOCSIS 3.1 cable network could do a lot of the leg work (1Gbps seems plausible, although full duplex 1Gbps may take a lot longer to arrive), but BTOpenreach would need longer to roll-out FTTP/H on such a scale and their G.fast service is otherwise aiming for a maximum download speed of 500Mbps by 2025. Meanwhile smaller operators, such as Hyperoptic, will help by nibbling around the poorly served edges but they can’t do the whole of London.

The other question is where the money would come from, particularly since EU State Aid rules are rather restrictive when it comes to allowing public funds to be used in areas where the private sector should really have no excuse for not doing it themselves. It would also be interesting to see how many of the 20 other UK cities that FISP moots for Gigabit status will actually end up achieving total FTTP/H coverage by 2020 (they appear to be confusing Cityfibre’s very hypothetical “addressable market” coverage with actual “premises passed”).

Still we’d certainly welcome a more forward thinking approach to connectivity and funding, but we’d need to see this alongside a proper examination of the costs (including likely funding sources) and timescale. Otherwise the DfL idea appears to have gained some support from the City of London Policy and Resources Committee, Federation of Small Businesses, IoD and the Westminster Council.