Great minds thinking…

I don’t know why but I find myself surprised – and a little excited - whenever I see something in the press that echoes one of my own stories.  Like a little boy, I want to put my hand up and shout out: “Sir!..., Sir!, I wrote that in my blog last year!” Well, you can imagine my reaction when I recently spotted not one but two such reports…  

The first was another reminder that the explosive growth in mobile data relies very heavily on capacity provided by fixed networks. My piece last November used new data from Ofcom’s Infrastructure Report to show that the volume of data flowing on fixed lines is roughly 24-times that of the mobile networks.  The more recent – and rather more interesting - perspective on this issue comes from a chart in a WIK presentation recently reviewed by Fiber Revolution.  The chart shows an international comparison of the proportion of mobile data traffic that is offloaded to Wi-Fi networks. The conclusion drawn from this is striking, i.e. 

 “Basically, only a quarter to a third of the data traffic consumed by mobile devices is actually delivered over mobile networks (except in Japan and India where it’s half)”. 

The second instance of look-alike coverage concerns the government’s proposed spend on the HS2 rail project.  Way back in March 2011, I merely observed that this planned spend, £33bn, was more than enough to provide point-to-point fibre to every household in the UK - the deluxe broadband option (estimated by Analysys Mason to cost less than £29bn).  In fairness, the updated version of the same comparison, provided by Nesta, does a much better job.  Nesta argue, pretty convincingly, that the broadband option would not only be cheaper but achieved faster and capable of delivering greater economic benefit… 

So, OK, it’s always possible for subsequent coverage to buff up the prose or to refine the analysis:  but I just remind myself that this is, after all, ‘the sincerest form of flattery’!