Oldham Council Says – Bring Forward Gigabit Broadband to 2023

The Leader of Oldham Council, Sean Fielding, yesterday told watchers of the Mayor of Greater Manchester’s (Andy Burnham) weekly press conference on the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic that the UK Government’s aim of making “gigabit broadband” available to every home by 2025 “should be brought forward to 2023.” Ok.. how?

We should point out that Andy Burnham was being flanked by Oldham Council Leader, Sean Fielding, and Stockport Council Leader, Elise Wilson. A full transcript of this meeting isn’t available, but we have taken the time to transcribe what was said by Sean from the hour long YouTube video of this event below.

Sadly, every once in awhile, a politician will appear to exhibit magical powers by claiming that they can achieve or think the Government can achieve something significant and often in a fundamentally unrealistic time-scale; albeit usually without actually conducting any prior feasibility research or providing much solid detail.

Boris Johnson’s (PM) pre-Election pledge to cover every home with “full fibre” (FTTP) broadband by the end of 2025 is one such example (here), which was predictably later watered down post-Election to include other technologies and under the more generalised “gigabit-capable broadband” banner (here); but even this softer target remains an extremely difficult one to hit.

The latest politician to join this group (not that there’s a shortage or anything) is Sean Fielding, who appeared to be expressing a position that was tacitly supported by both Andy Burnham and Elise Wilson. But what may work in Oldham, won’t work for the rest of the UK.

Sean Fielding, Leader of Oldham Council, said:

“Fibre connectivity is really really key to ensuring that there is the bandwidth and the capacity for more people to be able to work at home. The benefits that we’ve realised as a council, and that the combined authority have realised from having more people working at home, can be realised by other organisations right across GM.

So we really want to lobby now for gigabit capable broadband to be brought forward to 2023. The government’s targets around that are currently based on a delivery period of 2025 and we know that we will work to get 45% of Greater Manchester connected up to gigabit broadband and we want to go much further.”

Perhaps Manchester’s leaders have somehow developed a magical way to deploy gigabit broadband via fixed connections across the UK that nobody else has managed to figure out yet? Perhaps he’s hoping to do it all with LEO Satellites, 5G mobile or fixed wireless broadband instead (the only plausible ways to potentially achieve a target of 2023 and, even then, getting “gigabit” speeds from those to every home doesn’t seem viable)? In any case he doesn’t say.

Sadly just setting an even more unrealistic target, and then telling the UK government to go and deliver on that, isn’t equal to an effective or properly researched and funded deployment strategy. This is of course before we tackle the as yet uncertain, albeit almost definitely negative, impact of COVID-19 on the existing roll-out pace of such technologies (an ironically overlooked point given the topic of the press conference).

Certainly we have yet to see any positive impact on the pace of deployment due to the on-going disruption of COVID-19 on areas like complex supply chains and the available workforce. Social distancing rules also tend to slow down the deployment itself as working in close proximity is made much more challenging.

The framework for the Government’s gigabit policy isn’t even expected to be ready until 2021 and then you have to allow time for contracts to be agreed, which takes us toward the end of 2021 before real build can begin (given how such tenders often suffer delays then late 2021 may even be overly optimistic for some projects).

In short, you’d probably get roughly 2 years to make gigabit broadband universally available and that’s not even remotely realistic for the UK. Building new networks takes a lot of time, even with the Government’s watering down of language and technology choice. The work is highly unlikely to be done by 2025 (it’ll probably need a few more years to plug any remaining gaps), unless the target is watered down further, and so we can’t see how it can seriously be brought forward to 2023.

However, if Oldham Council has indeed found a way to do this for the whole of the UK, and modelled that with proof, then please do share. We can guarantee that an entire industry would love to know how to achieve what otherwise seems more or less impossible. We should point out that Oldham itself might stand a fair chance of achieving a 2023 target, but the rest of the UK wouldn’t.