Here in Norfolk we are delighted by the news that the county council has won match funding from the government to radically improve broadband services in the much deprived rural areas. The county and government will each provide £15m and they have to find a commercial partner to put in a further £30m and develop the project.
To show the potential the county, with huge support from the Eastern Daily Press has launched a registration campaign, on and offline - see it at CLICK.
In Lyng we have our own project which has resulted in NCC coming forward with a proposal to use their library internet service to deliver better broadband by wi-fi to the village. The planning proposal for this has been passed and a timeline is due soon. It will deliver useful speed around 2 meg and may be something of a pilot for other projects. Indeed a not dissimilar set up could well figure as part of the solution when the current campaign brings in partners.
We have 120 plus signed up. But the county campaign needs to do well - it has only 90 days to run. In just over a week it has 4,500 registrations - which may mean less than 40,000 in the period. There are over 200,000 premises in the rural area - it may be 300,000 but figures were hard to rely on. At first it looked like over 55,000 was possible.
That may sound OK but the investment ratio is less brilliant. The partner will get the county and government's £30m but will be expected to put up £30m as well. If we assume even 60,000 customers that means an investment per customer of 60m divided by 60k - I make that £1,000 per customer. Now the commercial partner will have had to find £500 of that and will want their investment back in say 10 years (standard commercial period) which is £50 a year. Interest will be low as of current rates but lets say another £50 per customer p.a. in loan charges etc. It means each customer has to deliver £100 of revenue stream on top of costs and profit. Current prices for the sort of broadband proposed is about £20 a month or £240 a year. You can see where I am going. I think we need more than 55,000 sign-ups by a factor of 50 to 100%? I hope I am wrong but it goes to show what a difficult territory Norfolk is for this sort of project.
Another issue is that all the talk is about starting to deliver broadband of 2 meg and more in 2013 but the BDUK bid is realistic - it says the project's success should be reviewed in late 2015 - and that means the project will either end around then or be running down. Which means huge numbers of people signing up now won't see any result until sometime in 2015.
Third item of interest is that in the case studies on the Say Yes site is one of the many schools which have superfast broadband - Reepham. Now this service is delivered by fibre to the premises (FTTP) laid in with EU and other public money as part of the EU's education project. It is barred from use for commercial purposes because of these EU rules - which the UK notably obeys to the letter; others do not. In any event the reality is that huge fibre pipes already criss cross the county providing multi-meg services to the desktops of students who go home and cannot even do their homework on line because of the poor service from BT. Surely this hugely expensive/valuable network should be turned to advantage as part of the BDUK project and hugely reducing overall costs in the process. At Reepham school this fat pipe runs to within 100 metres of Reepham exchange which is yet to be fibre enabled. See Samknows at http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/EAREE
To show the potential the county, with huge support from the Eastern Daily Press has launched a registration campaign, on and offline - see it at CLICK.
In Lyng we have our own project which has resulted in NCC coming forward with a proposal to use their library internet service to deliver better broadband by wi-fi to the village. The planning proposal for this has been passed and a timeline is due soon. It will deliver useful speed around 2 meg and may be something of a pilot for other projects. Indeed a not dissimilar set up could well figure as part of the solution when the current campaign brings in partners.
We have 120 plus signed up. But the county campaign needs to do well - it has only 90 days to run. In just over a week it has 4,500 registrations - which may mean less than 40,000 in the period. There are over 200,000 premises in the rural area - it may be 300,000 but figures were hard to rely on. At first it looked like over 55,000 was possible.
That may sound OK but the investment ratio is less brilliant. The partner will get the county and government's £30m but will be expected to put up £30m as well. If we assume even 60,000 customers that means an investment per customer of 60m divided by 60k - I make that £1,000 per customer. Now the commercial partner will have had to find £500 of that and will want their investment back in say 10 years (standard commercial period) which is £50 a year. Interest will be low as of current rates but lets say another £50 per customer p.a. in loan charges etc. It means each customer has to deliver £100 of revenue stream on top of costs and profit. Current prices for the sort of broadband proposed is about £20 a month or £240 a year. You can see where I am going. I think we need more than 55,000 sign-ups by a factor of 50 to 100%? I hope I am wrong but it goes to show what a difficult territory Norfolk is for this sort of project.
Another issue is that all the talk is about starting to deliver broadband of 2 meg and more in 2013 but the BDUK bid is realistic - it says the project's success should be reviewed in late 2015 - and that means the project will either end around then or be running down. Which means huge numbers of people signing up now won't see any result until sometime in 2015.
Third item of interest is that in the case studies on the Say Yes site is one of the many schools which have superfast broadband - Reepham. Now this service is delivered by fibre to the premises (FTTP) laid in with EU and other public money as part of the EU's education project. It is barred from use for commercial purposes because of these EU rules - which the UK notably obeys to the letter; others do not. In any event the reality is that huge fibre pipes already criss cross the county providing multi-meg services to the desktops of students who go home and cannot even do their homework on line because of the poor service from BT. Surely this hugely expensive/valuable network should be turned to advantage as part of the BDUK project and hugely reducing overall costs in the process. At Reepham school this fat pipe runs to within 100 metres of Reepham exchange which is yet to be fibre enabled. See Samknows at http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/EAREE