Superfast broadband may escape many

Neil Watson: What about the final third?

BT is planning to install ducts and overhead lines to improve broadband speeds for two-thirds of the UK by 2015.

However, businesses as well as consumers should not get too carried away because patchy availability will remain for some time even in areas with enabled exchanges, due to the required upgrading of all street cabinets.

And the products being rolled out by BT will continue to be delivered over massively shared networks. Yet it is still common to hear people say they only get a fraction of the speed they believe they have paid for.

Issues such as rate adaption (line speed dictated by the distance from the exchange) as well as contention will continue to affect services.

In reality you are paying for just a share of the available bandwidth, and peak times can result in speeds that are much lower than the advertised maximum throughput.

The ability to sell end-to-end Quality-of-Service (QoS) is going to be crucial. When QoS becomes available on shared services, businesses will be able to dedicate some of the available bandwidth for their own exclusive use.

We will hopefully see this available on a BT 21st century network (21CN) broadband connection from any business supplier on access technologies such as ADSL2+, FTTC (VDSL2) and FTTP by the end of 2010 or early 2011.

The channel should meanwhile advise customers on overcoming these limitations in the short term. Network infrastructure that can scale and into which ‘superfast’ access technologies can be easily integrated.

BT’s roll-out should level the playing field for more organisations, but for those left out, the question of how to actually deliver superfast speeds to the whole country is more important than ever.

Legitimate concerns remain regarding those left out – the ‘final third’ – will there ever be enough commercial drivers to roll out fibre services in those areas?

Are we likely to see a fractured approach based around community projects in more rural areas, and how will competition flourish under these circumstances?

What will the government need to do to cover this final third in a reasonable timeframe and at prices similar to those within more densely populated areas? These are the big questions that still need to be answered.

Neil Watson is indirect sales director at Viatel