The Next Gen Roadshow at Basingstoke this week, organised by the Community Broadband Network, was another excellent set of presentations about the exciting NGA developments around the country, featuring the Gateshead, Fibrespeed Wales, Bradley and eHampshire projects.
But even amongst the audience of committed enthusiasts for NGA, for whom it can sometimes seem more like a religious quest than a commercial activity, some notes of caution were being sounded by those whose role it would be to convince investors to loosen their purse-strings. It seemed to be fairly generally accepted that standard commercial business cases would not fly without some other funding, so looking for justifications has become the name of the game.
Ed Vaizey, the Shadow Minister for Culture, wanted to “encourage” local community initiatives, and was not happy with the Digital Britain proposal of only a 2Mb/s USO, but he was far less keen on any central government involvement. It appears that an incoming Tory government would be even less likely to fund NGA development than the current one in these straitened times.
There are still some “build it and they will come” technology enthusiasts around, but there were also some very much more practical suggestions as to how to fund the investment:
- Local authority-led projects could use the “externalities” of savings elsewhere – eg on transport, in the NHS etc – to add extra benefits into the case; avoiding the problem of budget silos is the main challenge here
- Looking to the examples of the US and Australia where even in these free-market conditions, state funding looks to be favoured
- “MUSCOs” (multi-utility service companies) could be a way of reducing the highest cost element, the civil engineering, by sharing it across several services
- new business models which change the relationship between end user and content provider (the so-called JON model, which aggregates patchwork developments)
- integrating NGA into wider local planning decisions on infrastructure
- requiring property developers to install NGA on all new build plans, or at least to install open access ducts
- bringing communities together to have an ownership and interest in the local services (ie increasing take-up and penetration)
- or even, as in Bradley, use local farmers to dig up the roads more cheaply (the “Bradnet” speaker seemed to be suggesting a protection racket with the electricity company – “our tractors do seem to be damaging your overhead lines a lot, so why not build a new underground duct” !!).
Adroit Economics shared their views on developing the business case in a way that gets through the bureaucratic process. But each case will still be a challenge, and will need some fairly fancy footwork to show a positive result.
