Point Topic on Next Generation Access
Point Topic have been busy crunching numbers to illustrate how Next Generation Access (NGA) might be implemented throughout the UK using Carter’s 50p phone tax levy and price increases.
They have divided the country into four zones based on the cost of implementing Next Generation Access, in essence these are zones defined by population density. It is assumed that 60% of users would be prepared to pay an extra £1.50 per month for a faster service and that it will cost £50,000 to equip a street cabinet to serve 1.6 sq.km. This leads Point Topic to conclude that the minimum economic density for a commercial NGA rollout is 500 lines per sq.km.
High density areas with at least 500 lines per sq.km cover just over 9,000 km² or 3.8% of the UK land area and contain 12.75m or 76.6% of lines. The next band, with 30 – 500 lines per sq.km, includes suburban fringes, villages and more populated areas of the countryside covering 8.9% of the land area and housing 17.4% of lines. Together these two bands represent 94% of lines but only 12.7% of the land area. In the second band a subsidy is required to address the shortfall between the costs and the extra revenue generated.
The areas in the top two bands are coloured blue and green on this example map showing the South East of England :-
The third band, with 10-30 lines per sq.km, sees a transition from continuous development to essentially small villages and hamlets with no continuous built up areas. Consequently the required subsidy goes from £12.90 per line in band B to £129 in band C.
Moving further out into areas of lower population density it is suggested that where there are less than 10 lines per sq.km “case by case solutions” are required and the communities are left to sort it out for themselves.
A case is also made in the report for focusing on the quality of the service rather than its headline speed. A robust service with a minimum of 4 Mbits/s and low latency could be a better bet than a bursty contended service at 40 Mbits/s if the user is trying to stream video or some other real time application.
[ Point Topic ] (registration required)
Tags: 50p, Carter, Digital Britain, fttc, NGA
Category: Broadband Availability, Broadband Fibre, Broadband Pricing
July 9th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
this all builds a case for the government to reduce the taxation on lit fibre and it will reduce the cost sufficiently for BT to find it economic to deliver to the areas further from the exchanges?
July 9th, 2009 at 8:39 pm
Is this map based on actual exchange areas and cabinet locations?
July 10th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
How do VM fit into this? Are they being ignored?
July 12th, 2009 at 10:41 am
The map is based on population density alone, as far as I can tell. VM is mentioned in that virtually all its network falls into Band A.
FTTH networks and VM CATV are currently rated at about £7/yr/property which isn’t a massive barrier.
Point to Point fibre within networks costs a lot more although BT are rated on a different basis (favourable) to newcomers.
July 13th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
Surely the costs are to do with distance of cabinet to exchange (maybe not the local one) and number of customers on it?
July 15th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
The number of customers aspect is taken care of by the population density – more customers falling within the range of a cabinet.
Running a fibre backhaul will have a cost per km but that’s probably a modest part of the total cost if it can be taken down an existing duct.