Broadband News

If you've not got time to read the full 245 pages of Digital Britain, Samknows.com (SK) is here to help you understand what it means for the country's online future. Because it's a special occasion we've got our first ever interview with Samknows co-founder Alex Salter (AS). If he's good enough for the BBC, he might just be good enough for us.

SK: Could you tell us about your reaction to the Digital Britain report?

AS: First of all, it's a huge document that covers an enormous amount of topics which affect all of us because of the importance of the Internet and media in today's society. So you're looking at thorny topics like what happens to Channel 4 and Channel 5 and BBC Worldwide - and whether they should be merged or part merged - right the way through to this universal connectivity commitment that the first report alluded to and how the Government's actually going to achieve that.

SK: One of the features of the report is this levy on copper cables – how do you perceive that?

AS: I think what happened when the Digital Britain team actually went into the industry to find how they were going to reach their original "up to 2Mbit/s" target, which is their connectivity commitment, I think they found that whilst the providers welcomed this initiative they didn't want to be solely responsible for paying for it.

What we have at the moment is a good network but it's being driven by market forces. So where there are people, where it is less expensive to deploy and where there is demand – i.e. when ISPs can make money – that's where there's fast connectivity. What the Government's talking about in this part of their project is where people are far away from telephone exchanges or where ISPs perceive there being a lower return on investment if they're to extend their network to these people. What I think the Government found was that those providers were very reticent for paying for that themselves because they can't see a return on their investment.

SK: So this commitment to universal coverage for all by 2012: is that possible?

AS: The 50p levy is going to be used as a seed fund to stimulate a programme that the Government says will make that possible and what they're saying is that part is going to be this infrastructural overhaul where they're going to aim for next-generation access. The other part of that is very much focused in the home to improve people's own personal setups – whether it's their wiring or their own routers, computers – and educating people on how they can optimise that.

The Government seems very bullish being to achieve that. And I noticed in today's report that they've switched from "up to 2Mbit/s" to "at 2Mbit/s" – which in itself doesn't seem like much, but in these Government documents it's all about the detail – and it looks like much more solid commitment from that point of view.

SK: One of the things that a lot of people where desperate to find out about ahead of the report was the Government's anti-piracy measures. What do you think of the ones in the final report?

AS: It's very interesting to see how the Government are going to tackle this. Stephen Carter in the room said that he does lean towards the people who think that we should be doing more to protect people's intellectual property rights and stamp out piracy. He actually said that – and he was saying that in an official capacity as well.

The content owners' lobbyists are very strong and they're very motivated and they're trying to implement a system whereby people's intellectual property is protected. This report pushes the onus for that straight onto the ISPS – and if they ISPs don't do it, then it's saying that what they want Ofcom to do is actually impose a set of controls on the ISPs to force them to do it. So, whereas before the ball was really in the air and no-one knew who was going to be the party that was responsible for clamping down on this stuff, this document nods towards the ISPs; they're saying that the ISPs are going to be the ones that are going to have to control this.

SK: Another nod in the document is towards the liberalisation of the 3G spectrum. What kind of impact do you think that's going to have on broadband users in the UK?

AS: When I talk to engineers who work for the mobile tel-co's they're telling me about experiments with the next-generation mobile broadband networks, where they can deliver circa 20Mbit/s over mobile broadband. Now that's a long way away from what people can achieve nowadays, mainly due to congestion on the network. But at the moment people are using mobile broadband for just checking stuff – you know you're not browsing typically, you're just checking a few things or sending a few documents. So it's kind of fast hit, low traffic. But as we go forward these improved and enhanced 3G networks are going to allow us to do a lot more, which is really import as people start to use gadgets like the iPhone, the next-generation Blackberry and the Nokia phones that are coming out now as well.

SK: Can I ask you about the sections of the Digital Britain report concerning the BBC? There's talk of diverting some of the licence fee to funding universal broadband access, for example.

AS: Lord Carter's talking about this digital switchover fund: any under-spend will be moved across. Now this goes back to the point I made before about when the Government were looking at ways of funding this universal connectivity commitment; they just didn't have many options open to them – probably as much to do with the situation with the economy at the moment as anything else. Now there's a hundred million pounds plus sat there and I think 11.3 million pounds has been spent so far, so they are envisaging some surplus there and they just want to be able to move that money across. But that and the 50p levy still won't be enough to fund this next-generation broadband access and that's why the onus is still, again, going to be on the ISPs. They want to give the ISPs an impetus for them to go into these less-profitable areas and this is how they want to do it: by co-financing it with them.

SK: One last thing: we've been reading a lot recently that broadband is as valuable as gas and electricity to people's lives. We were wondering what you think about that.

AS: I think there's a lot of exciting things being written about broadband currently and there's no doubt it is very important to the UK's economy. There are really fundamental things that people rely upon the Internet for at the moment – like doing their food shopping, like hunting for jobs online, maybe doing some research for some homework, maybe for leisure; there are ways that the Internet touches all of our lives. I'm not sure if it is as important as being warm, for example, or being fed – but it's certainly significant if you don't have Internet connectivity. That's where this universal connectivity comes in. So I really look at what they Government's trying to do there and I think they've got a very comprehensive and reasonable approach to this. The thing that I'm looking at next is who they're going to appoint – what the body is going to be – that actually looks to implement this universal connectivity strategy.