Pre- Next Generation Fund.
A 2Mb service which supported the key services I
outlined would be adequate for a great many people. £30 a month including the phone line or mobile rental would be perfectly acceptable. Include a 20GB download limit, with good allowances for peak hour usage where the user controlled the distribution of the available quality and much could be achieved.
A properly run 2Mbps can have the same utility as a poorly run 24Mbps service. Speed is important to get more volume but cannot be fully used unless all the properties of the services are tuned correctly, which is why we need proper
labelling for each package.
It is clear a certain amount of make do is needed with the existing generation of networking. You can describe a quality home working experience but you cannot deliver it everywhere. Here I use a quality home working experience as a proxie for applications that need moderate but consistently low packet loss.
The advent of the Next Generation Fund will have a transformative effect.
Impact of Next Generation Fund (proposed £1.5bn public money)
In the BBBritain
submission to BIS we estimated the impact on rural communications of the Next Generation fund could result in;
- at least a 5 times increase in average speed over todays average urban speed for both fixed (15Mbits ps) and roam from home (600Kbits pa) - (note this is under review).
a 10 times improvement (.1% packet loss) in quality for applications that need it.
a factor of 16 times increase in peak hour resources.
Unlimited usage for all local networking.
Coverage in excess of 99%
The Next Generation Fund and the Universal Service Commitment
UK policy makers have allocated £200m of the Digital Switchover funding to assist with not-spots and slow spots. There are also conditions within the proposed spectrum modernisation regime which provide minimum coverage objectives for mobile operators. With circa 2m premises incapable of reaching the 2Mbps threshold, it is likely about £300 per household is needed to support a Wifi delivered solitons. Thus in BBBritain submission we assume spending the £200m to deliver the USC is one outcome of the programme to deliver next generation access, where the £200m is used to stretch the NGA solution that bit further.