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by Peter Dzwig
The Carter report on “Digital Britain” calls for “universal connectivity” with bandwidths of 2Mbit/s nationwide. Is this a realistic target? Is it a worthwhile target? Probably not.
Looking at the growth in Internet traffic and bandwidth over recent years, that target figure seems absurdly low, let alone sufficient to make the UK “the global Internet business capital”. As we all know, a promised delivery rate generally falls far short in practice. If the rate were being promised to your front door, that would be a great deal better, but the report doesn't say that it is. Surely the £150–200 M or so that will be raised by a £6 annual levy on fixed lines to help fund the service won't actually go very far towards delivering a reliable high-speed net. In many other nations, target bandwidths that are much higher than the UK's would-be goals are already being delivered.
In the UK perhaps more than in many countries, delivery is very uneven. A quick check on SpeedTest reveals that, in the UK, Ceredigion has the fastest average download speed at 10.2 Mb/s with upload speeds of 7.7 Mb/s. A glance at the relatively affluent, high population density commuter areas such as Hampshire and Surrey shows very large areas in which speeds are well below 1 Mb/s in realistic terms. Many feature as “notspots”. The reasons given by industry for there not being greater connectivity is economic. In SpeedTest's global lists UK features 54th in the upload speed league and 41st by download speed.
There is no doubt that the aim of building a high performance UK-wide network is well-worth achieving, but that is a very substantial undertaking. But why go off at half-cock? The only real solution is going to be the provision of a nationwide fibre network capable of taking the traffic that we are going to need in ten years time. Not just today. Such a system has to provide much better speeds in terms of both upload and download. While people concentrate on download speeds, next generation interactive applications, video conferencing, video streaming, image download for printing and gaming need for speeds to be greater in both directions. This need will only increase. It would seem logical that, in order to be able to deliver this we need to put in a national fibre network and to do that it is going to take more than a couple of hundred million per year. In that case one is forced to ask whether the Carter strategy is right and whether it is not too modest in its aims, laudable though those may be in the short-term.
Emerging technologies, hardware and software are behind this, particularly in embedded applications. Applications are being built to take advantage of user demand because these can be realised with increased processor ability available and coming over the next few years. The growth of processor capacity has driven by new technologies. Key among these is multicore...which is why you are reading this here!