You may be just as delighted as I was to watch a long House of Lords session here.
However the interview lasts about 80 minutes hence see below.
http://bit.ly/GCDMg7Kind regards
Walter
E
DIT Below is an incomplete summary of some of the main points produced by an associate of mine who holds very similare views to my own on this sad and sorry débâcle.
Dr Peter Cochrane is a well known FTTP advocate and he made a perfect opening statement saying 2Mb/s is liking giving someone a morse key. He went on to say that the UK is well down the fibre and broadband league table and that the minimum aiming point to remain competitive with the rest of the world should be 100Mb/s. He mentioned that Jersey, a project he knows well, already has 1Gb/s FTTH and many other countries around the world have the same.
Under questioning he said that broadband was a strategic necessity, more important than roads and railways to the future economy of the UK and reminded the committee of the days when the national telecommunications industry served the population, not self-serving as now with the shareholders the main beneficiaries.
He was asked what 100Mb/s does for an average household and answered with his vision based on developments in e-health, education and media consumption, that he saw as more and more on demand rather than broadcast. (Interesting to note the sceptical body language of the two characters sitting behind him – could they be from Ofcom or BT?). On the industrial front he sees a world that does not ship products, but where a manufacturing process is dispersed requiring the shipping of designs and solutions possibly from small companies, all needing very fast data transport. He thinks that we should engineer for tomorrow, not for today’s outmoded processes.
He said that if we only go fibre half-way that in a few years it will need upgrading. Good phrases like, “FTTC is one of the biggest mistakes, ties a knot in the cable and is unreliable and subject to the local copper/battery thieves.” He said 4G would need 4 or 5 times more masts, and in any case will not do the job.
He recites his own personal battle to get fibre to his village – the usual story BT wanting hundreds of thousands and two private fibre circuits each within 0.5km, but not accessible. He says that no one is more than a kilometre from fibre and that this should be accessible.
He thought that the best use of the £530M public funding would be to invest in the small players with a cooperative business model to break the stranglehold of BT /Virgin Media and provide real competition and actually change the attitude of the incumbent(s).
He spoke strongly on the need for a level playing field, with BT wiping out smaller start-up providers as one of the worse things he has seen and said that this was unhealthy for progress. He cited Cambridge Wireless as one such company where the incumbent had moved in and said that this was repeated behaviour. (I hope the committee can put two and two together from other evidence of this behaviour).
When questioned on how to do it he called for Government and regulators to be facilitators to enable small companies to secure investment for cooperative business models a la some American communities (and B4RN – but not mentioned).
Later towards the end, he stated that the BT business model of squeezing out all competition was not very clever.
Lots of DIY engineering was discussed for various villages where committee members live – so it seems that they have all met the problem and the BT attitude.
The Chairman asked where the committee should go to see best fibre deployment. Dr Cochrane said Scandinavia as a lot of DIY there and perhaps Singapore.
