There’s a growing clamour to crack on with nationwide deployment of ‘next-generation’ local network infrastructures  - in common parlance, fibre to every home and business.  The UK’s ‘Pipe Dreams?’ report from the Broadband Stakeholders Group was not, however, universally welcome.  There are many action-delaying reasons proffered by those who feel most threatened by the advent of fibre.

The fact that ‘last generation’ network access has yet to be taken up and used in earnest by thousands of small businesses is, for example, taken as evidence of insufficient demand to justify immediate investment in better broadband.

At the same time, those who are most concerned with regional and local economic growth are determined to ‘remedy’ (by publicly-funded initiatives) this apparent lack of enthusiasm and transformational enterprise amongst the long tail of businesses who have yet to hop aboard the broadband bus.

Both perspectives are best described by the memorable words of the late Bernard Levin, as being ‘popular substitutes for five minutes thought’.   Bernard was, of course, writing about something vastly more important (repeated calls for the reintroduction of capital punishment) but his point was to challenge preconceived notions and the preservation of comfortable certainties that have long passed their ‘sell-by’ date.

In the matter of the nation’s broadband infrastructure it seems not to have occurred to either the Delayers of the New or the Promoters of the Old that the most-likely reason for the apparent lack of market enthusiasm among the ‘laggards’ is that what is currently on offer is simply not good enough, not obviously useful enough, not yet sufficiently convenient or ‘user-friendly’, to make the effort of learning about and acquiring it worthwhile.

Alas, this is not what regulators mean when they define ‘Market Failure’.  It is however what any technically well-informed business manager outside of the telecoms industry and the government (including their regulator) might classify as Imagination Failure.

We can be reasonably sure that in some sectors, or in some rural areas, the low levels of job mobility, or just a lack of recruitment of young IT-literate job-seekers, may have slowed the rate of  knowledge-sharing and the wider enlightenment (or business disruption) that broadband is supposed to engender.  But we live in a market economy where competition will, sooner or later, force such issues to be addressed or at least demand that we re-affirm our freedom to not conform to these top-down notions of on-line business ubiquity.

Much of the concern about the take-up of broadband by smaller companies is driven not by what might be good for your business but what is good/convenient for telephone companies and the government.  As tax-paying citizens, we all have an interest in public sector efficiency, and there may some wider ‘public good’ case for seeing broadband as an investment for your company but, hang on, you might well say, ‘that’s really my own business’.

The economists are probably right. A vastly better national broadband infrastructure will unlock service innovation, introduce more competition, provide easier market entry for new service providers, and deliver services that make more sense and provide greater value for more businesses in more locations.  The national economic benefit of better broadband seems certain to vastly exceed the £60bn benefit claimed for a similarly-scaled investment in high-speed railway lines.  But most of the desirable outcomes from investment in local fibre networks are unlikely to enthuse the dominant incumbent provider.  It suits the suits to continue pretending that no-one really wants anything better than the string-and-tin-can efforts of the last generation – leastways not yet.

It is inevitable, simply because fibre cannot be deployed everywhere at once, that we are looking towards an era of increased digital diversity.  Islands of fibre will only gradually spread towards nationwide coverage.  The gaps between the haves and have-nots will, for about 10 years, be even greater than today.

But far from being a reason for delay (or a ‘national disgrace’), the notion of digital diversity has some real benefits.  New investors with new ideas can fuel an era of innovation and competition that is way beyond the capability of last generation fixed networks.   The single fibre to your home or office can deliver multiple concurrent services from multiple concurrent suppliers – providing, of course, that the regulator demands that competition and innovation in services is not confused with the basic utility of getting access to them.

Fibre technology offers the opportunity to separate the businesses of supplying Access and Service – and those considering investment in Access (the local fibre networks to replace narrow-band copper wires) will soon realise that maximising usage of the network is best achieved by making the ‘head end’ of networks fully open to any service provider.  The new networks will not need to be ‘unbundled’ if the Access utilities and the Services that travel through them are not close-coupled clones of the copper generation.

‘Open Access’ networks are emerging all over Europe and, faced with the new realities, the established Telco’s and TV programme distributors are happy to sign up.   Relieved of the infrastructure investment burden and the costly maintenance of the old and inadequate copper networks, they can be set free to innovate in Service provision.  It is telling that many of these networks are initiated by public sector needs and that the local community is often the primary stakeholder.

Most people might visualise the impact of better broadband in terms of domestic consumer services – video-in TV programmes instead of phone-in radio, perhaps.   But the real economic benefit will be found in business.  You could, for example, have a choice of continuing to manage your network of, say, 100 PC’s in umpteen locations, or simply route the users at very high speed (equally fast in both directions) to a remote but ‘green’ data centre offering ‘hosted services’.  It is only now dawning on business minds, encouraged by innovations such as Skype, that, with vastly better broadband, even the most basic telephony service (including your own office telephone system) is, or could be, just another remotely-hosted service.

Do we vote for UK business to stay parked on the hard shoulder of incumbent convenience (or the soft pillow of regulatory slumber) or is it time that the long-promised superhighway (and the competitive multi-provider concurrent services it can handle) should at last stretch all the way to your front door?  Do we tolerate the current level of imagination failure?

Maybe we need a nationwide business referendum, a new willingness to embrace digital diversity and a more pragmatic and socially enterprising  approach to public/private investment in network infrastructure.  A high-fibre diet for economic health.

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This editorial was prepared as a discussion document following CMA's Annual Conference, February 2008.

See also CMA Editorial, 'Islands of Fibre' published in NetworkingPlus magazine, January 2008.