The Information Society Alliance (EURIM), a not-for-profit policy studies group that brings together politicians, officials and industry figures, has claimed that the UK government could blanket the entire country in superfast 100Mbps fibre optic broadband services and without needing more than the existing Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) budget of £830m until 2017.

The study team suggests that this could be achieved through a "mix of local enterprise and market forces [making] full use of existing infrastructure" (i.e. infrastructure sharing), which has to date been primarily focused upon opening-up BT Group's cable ducts and telegraph poles. However, this is only a small part of what could be leveraged.

Study Highlights

• There are 5,600 telephone exchanges in the UK through which broadband reaches homes. But there are 150,000 power substations reaching around 98 per cent of homes. In many cases fibre could be strung up alongside power lines to homes instead of digging up roads.

• The UK has an extensive schools network with a Government requirement for each to have a minimum standard of broadband connectivity. Primary schools typically have 20 megabits per second and secondary schools 100 megabits. In some cases these are already being used to provide broadband to local councils, businesses and homes.

• At the same time hundreds of millions of pounds are being spent to upgrade health service networks, councils around the UK are planning network upgrades and the Department of Energy and Climate Change is co-ordinating an £11 billion smart metering programme which will entail physical installation visits to over 30 million households and businesses as well as an always-on communications network.

The report claims that sharing and building on existing infrastructures could cut costs and boost the coverage of related services for other applications (e.g. business and residential use). In fairness the government has already talked about doing something similar, although to date we've only seen isolated examples in the wider market (e.g. Virgin Media's trial of fibre optic cables over telegraph poles). Doing this on a national scale is far more complicated, with each area being different from the last.

Still, we do have doubts about the 100% figure for fibre optic broadband. Certainly you can run fibre optic cables over some, but not all, electricity poles and even through existing cable ducts, but other areas would still need expensive road works. Never the less it's actually an old idea and one that regulators and governments alike have always found difficult to develop. Hopefully EURIM's work will help to fill in some of the gaps.