Shock horror! UK government raises the bar!

I recently looked at the published objectives of BDUK, the government’s broadband deployment agency, showing how the commitment to universal broadband coverage has evolved over time.  Generally speaking, there’s been a scaling back of ambition, absolute commitments and defined targets being replaced with more aspirational jargon.  For some time, the policy aims for ‘next generation’ or ‘superfast’ broadband seemed to be following a similar path, but then things changed…

BDUK’s original mission statement (under the former Labour administration) set the following objective:

To manage the spend of a ‘Next Generation Fund’ to deliver Next Generation Broadband to 90% of the country by 2017.

Under the coalition government, BDUK initially enjoyed joint management - by both BIS (the original parent) and DCMS. These two departments published the following revised aims:

[DCMS] Increase the penetration of high speed connectivity and plan for the use of public money (from whatever source) if necessary;

[BIS] Ensure this country has the best superfast broadband in Europe by the end of this parliament (2015).

BDUK’s recently published 'Delivery Model' document preserves the latter (BIS) objective, thus perpetuating both the undefined ‘best’ and the year 2015 as the relevant date for European benchmarking.  However, the document also takes note of the more explicit goals established under the EU’s ‘Europe 2020’ Strategy, i.e. to have 30Mbps available to all European citizens and for 50% access to 100Mbps by 2020.  Perhaps in recognition of the potential gulf between UK and EU objectives, Jeremy Hunt announced in May the government intention that ‘nine out of 10 homes and businesses in every county in the UK should have access to superfast broadband by 2015’. As a target, this seemed more comforting than the previous ‘best in Europe’ tag but still left some semantic doubts – what did ‘superfast’ mean? Why ‘90 per cent of people in each local authority area’ rather than plain, old ‘90% coverage’…?  Well, I’m happy to say that Ed Vaizey has now dispelled such doubts.  Speaking on the 5^th July at the Intellect Conference on ‘The future of digital entertainment’, his speech included the following:

”We’re pursuing ambitious plans to bring our infrastructure up to speed for a new digital age. We will ensure that 90% of the population have superfast broadband links by 2015 to greater than 24Mbps, and that there is universal coverage. The market will deliver the majority of this, but we have set aside more than £500 million to assist rollout”.

Now that target speed of 24 Mbps has some credibility as the dividing line between old and next generation broadband, so higher speeds will necessarily require some fibre in the access network.  And ‘90% of the population’ is reassuringly straightforward.  So, unlike its universal service pledge, the government’s commitment to the provision of superfast broadband has actually strengthened.  Bravo!