The joys of summer

As widely tipped, the inexorable 2-year Communications Review by DCMS has not produced a White Paper, as originally intended.  Instead, the Department squeezed out a so-called Strategy Paper today, only just in time for the summer recess.  The overwhelming feeling of anticlimax was heightened by the way DCMS trumpeted the publication:

“Putting consumers at the heart of communications policy: Maria Miller announces new strategy, including a nuisance calls crackdown, ending ‘bill shock’ and protecting children online”.

Two years of widespread consultation and a series of silly seminars for that…??!

Happily, there’s actually quite a lot more to the Strategy Paper than those headlines suggest.  In particular, the government finally appears to have taken on board that a broadband objective of ‘the best superfast network in Europe by 2015’ is seriously misjudged, not least because of its narrow focus and its shortsightedness.  At last, there is some prospect of the government aiming to develop the ’all-encompassing vision of pervasive broadband connectivity’ that the House of Lords said was missing from current policy:

“We need to plan long-term now if we are to have the digital infrastructure to support the technological advances that will be the platform for growth and opportunity in the UK… We will work in partnership with industry experts to develop a UK strategy for our digital communications infrastructure from 2015 to 2025... It will be underpinned by a technology-neutral approach, since fixed, fixed-wireless, mobile and satellite communications networks all have a part to play in achieving world-class connectivity”.

Heaven be praised!

Democracy in action

Oh boy, talk about a blood bath…  As if the temperature in Committee Room 15 wasn’t high enough, yesterday’s meeting between the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and interested parties in the BDUK fiasco generated a good deal more heat than light.  The Committee Chairwoman, Margaret Hodge, was her usual combative self but the other members of the PAC were equally belligerent in their interrogation of the apparent villains in the affair – BT and the civil servants.  The questioning of BT was particularly aggressive, poor old Sean Williams (Group Director Strategy, Policy and Portfolio) having to retain his sangfroid while BT was accused by Malcolm Corbett of acting towards broadband competitors like a “vampire death squid, lurking in the depths, waiting to gobble them up and destroy them. 

Predictably, Williams dismissed most of the flak as unfounded allegations but I was massively impressed with his ability to remain cool and collected under intense questioning.  OK, many of his responses may have amounted to ‘I see no ships’ but he never once ducked against any of the allegations levelled against BT, some justified, others less so. 

As regards DCMS, the meeting recorded a big vote of confidence in Maria Miller, who Nicholas James, (Chief Executive, UK Broadband) described as genuinely keen to foster more competitive outcomes in the BDUK process. The same could not be said for the two civil servants ‘on trial’ - Sir Jonathan Stephens (Permanent Secretary) and Jon Zeff (Senior DCMS Officer), who were accused by Hodge of working in a parallel universe. Their mauling by the committee was relentless but it did at least produce one credible action point: that BT’s planned speed and coverage maps for each local authority contract area should be published – not clear by whom – allowing potential suppliers to address the residual 10% of homes. 

Other than that, the main value of the meeting was in seeing the ‘bad guys’ being hauled over the coals.  Anyone else who relishes seeing them receive a ‘damned good thrashing’ should exercise their democratic rights here.  Enjoy!

Life in the fast lane

It’s quite a while since I last mentioned the thorny topic of net neutrality.  Then as now, however, my view has been that the internet is a quirky (‘two-sided’) economic beast and that the emergence of alternative charging models was both inevitable and welcome – particularly at a time when parts of the internet value chain are facing new costs to upgrade capacity.  It therefore came as little surprise to hear that John Malone, the ‘born again’ cable mogul, is involved in just such a paradigm shift between major content owners and some broadband carriers …. 

According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, Malone is urging the US cable operators to act collectively in order to flex their muscles in dealings with the content owners – notably Netflix and YouTube (who together account for roughly 50% of peak-time broadband traffic).  Apparently, Malone’s vision of the future is a world in which consumers are able to buy tiers of broadband connectivity bundled to ‘various levels of access to over the top video services’. 

Clearly, the implication is that content owners would have to pay towards the cost of network capacity, a development that has been anticipated elsewhere but thought not – by me, at least - to have been effected.  However, and again according to the WSJ, such arrangements  already exist, leading Web suppliers such as Microsoft, Google and FaceBook paying the broadband providers ‘to get faster and smoother access to their networks’.

The article confirms that this sort of arrangement, content owners paying for enhanced network delivery, is legitimate under the FCC’S ’open Internet’ rules but would the same apply in Europe – where the net neutrality debate has been a little more opaque?  Happily, Neelie Kroes provided the answer last month in an interesting speech entitled "The EU, safeguarding the open internet for all".  It contained a number of proposals, including the following:

“First, we should allow innovation. The new services round the corner depend not just on content, but on high-quality connections...If someone wants to pay extra for that, no EU rules should stand in their way; it's not my job to ban people from buying those services, nor to prevent people providing them. If you don't want to buy them that is also fine, and you should absolutely continue to benefit from the ‘best efforts’ internet".

With a green light as clear as that, how long before we see two-tier internet delivery in the UK?