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UK’s Broadband Network Described as ‘Unacceptable’

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The UK’s Business Secretary has called the Country’s business broadband “unacceptable”.

Greg Clark, the business secretary, has said that major broadband upgrades are needed to support the government’s plans for industry. Speaking at the Institute of Directors’ annual conference, he said that the state of UK broadband was “unacceptable” for 2016.

Clark told attendees that he wanted entrepreneurs in the UK to be valued the same way that Olympians and Paralympians are, but that there were significant obstacles preventing British companies for achieving that – including the quality of broadband and mobile.

“We have new infrastructure like Crossrail about to open, but we have roads that are bottlenecked, trains overcrowded, and broadband and mobile coverage that is simply unacceptable in 2016,” said Clark.

“I believe it is time for our country to have an upgrade – an upgrade in our infrastructure so that we have smart and modern connections, physical and electronic.”

The government’s multi-million pound Broadband Delivery UK Fund has been driving fibre rollouts across the country, connecting 91% of the population to faster broadband already. It hopes to reach 95% by the end of next year, but that will still inevitably leave some areas without a decent connection.

Clark said that, while different parts of the country have different needs, government policy has treated everywhere as if it was the same.

Clark said: “It seems to me that helping Cornwall make the best of its future is as vital to a comprehensive national success as helping Birmingham – but what is needed in each place is different, and our strategy must reflect that.

“Many of the policies and decisions that form our industrial strategy will not be about particular industries or sectors, but will be cross-cutting.”

Clark likely found a receptive audience to his criticisms – the Institute of Directors has indicated that it wants a 10Gb broadband available to all businesses by 2030. Meanwhile, the government’s incoming Digital Economy Bill includes a universal service obligation of just 10Mb.

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– Duncan Heaney

UK Government shows interest in ‘Ultraspeed’ Transport

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The UK government has expressed its interest in hyperloop transport technology which would make a journey from London to Manchester just 18 minutes

Hyperloop One states it has held conversations with the government and private companies about potential UK transport routes and “there’s been quite a strong response” from the government. UK government representatives also attended Hyperloop One’s much-publicised propulsion test in Nevada, in May 2016.

The comments were made by Alan James, global VP of business development at Hyperloop One, who previously lobbied for UK Ultraspeed before joining the company.

“Innovate UK has taken the lead on that. It is joining together the department of Business, Innovation and Skills, and DFT (Department For Transport), to produce a coordinated response to the Hyperloop opportunity.”

“It’s very early stages,” a spokesperson for Innovate UK confirmed to WIRED. “This is a really exciting technology and we’re following it with interest.”

The company has also held conversations with the Peel Group, which owns the Manchester Canal route, about a Manchester-Liverpool route.

“Hyperloop could connect all the great cities of the English north not just to London, but to each other,” said James. “Making Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, effectively a single city, for instance.”

He also suggests hyperloop would be a cheaper and faster alternative to HS2, “which is currently, I believe, the most expensive railway project humanity has ever undertaken, on a per-kilometre basis. ”

“To take a UK example, London to Manchester would be 18 minutes. With High Speed Rail, we could reduce the journey time from London to Stoke from one hour 24 minutes to around one hour. With Hyperloop, we can reduce it to around 14 minutes.”

Elsewhere, the engineering giant ARUP, which has partnered with Hyperloop One, is consulting with the company over potential UK routes, including the use of tunnels instead of raised pylons.

“You could anticipate it could be quite cost effective,” said John Miles, an engineer at ARUP. “Our angle is looking at: what if we could build the first of its kind development here in the UK? What would the routes look like? I think Hyperloop has the potential to bring the London Underground experience to the national picture.”

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, the other LA-based startup attempting to build the first hyperloop, also said it had been in contact with the UK government.

“I met David Cameron. He was talking about £50million that he can give us through Innovate UK,” says Bibop Gresta, HTT’s chief operating officer, chairman, and ‘chief bibop officer’. (10 Downing Street declined to comment for this story.)

Hyperloop One currently has feasibility studies underway or completed in Russia, Dubai and the Nordics. HTT, meanwhile, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Slovakia to explore potential routes in the country.

Of course, all of these statements should be taken with an enormous spoonful of salt: while Hyperloop One is building a prototype in Nevada, no working hyperloop prototype has yet been built. Some engineers doubt that it would work, and dispute the idea’s projected engineering costs.

And, as investigations revealed, both Hyperloop startups are having their own issues – from the $250million lawsuit between Hyperloop One’s co-founders, to doubts over the legitimacy of HTT’s public claims.

Experts stated that any passenger routes would likely take years, if not decades, due to the regulatory requirements, the cost of acquiring land, and other complex procedures inherent to large infrastructure projects. “This is a technology that is so unproven,” said Dan Sperling, founding director of the Institute Of Transportation Studies at the university of California. “They need to demonstrate that it works at scale.”

“There’s some real challenges in there, and they shouldn’t be trivialized,” added Miles. “It will take years to engineer a system that works.”

– Oliver Franklin-Wallis

UK Government Broadband Plans

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The UK government plans that by 2017, about 95% of the country will have been covered by super-fast broadband and about 98% will have covered through 4G

The UK has a strong foundation for connectivity, but the Government recognizes the need to do more. So what is it doing about it?

As a Frontrunner, Britain is reaping the benefits of early investments in cloud and big data assets and a-well-thought-out strategy to drive the adoption of 4G, fiber optics, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

With an academic environment conducive to innovation and technical collaborations between the public and private sectors, as well as a steady flow of funding from the government, the stage is set for augmented innovation in Britain.

The terrain

The UK government is on a mission to transform its broadband network across the country to make speeds of 100 Mbps available to all of its citizens. In 2015, the UK Government announced it would invest £1.7 billion through 47 local projects to improve broadband – with the overall aim of ensuring that approximately 95 percent of the country has access to super-fast broadband by 2017 and 98 percent has 4G coverage.

Investments in high-speed broadband, data center (DC) networks, and cloud platforms are in turn creating a new form of competitive advantage.

Now, a growing community of developers is inventing new products and services, using these platforms as their foundation.

By fostering innovation, the UK is hoping to achieve an advantage in a global race to develop the standards that will underpin 5G, which experts expect will be crucial to the development of IoT and the growth of augmented innovation. Based on an audit by the National Infrastructure Committee the UK will set out its 5G strategy in 2017.

When it comes to fast broadband, the UK is leading the way, with adoption levels 50 percent higher than Germany and significantly higher than other major European economies. The uptake in fast broadband reflects a growing demand for media applications, especially for entertainment.

For instance, Virgin Media, part of Europe’s largest cable network, is planning to extend its reach from 12.6m homes to 17m – almost two-thirds of UK households – with an initiative called Project Lightning.

This plan is expected to create 6,000 jobs and is one of the largest private digital infrastructure investments in the UK in recent years.

Speed bumps

The UK has invested solidly in its digital infrastructure. It has the largest digital economy in the G20 as a percentage of GDP over the last five years. However, the international landscape is getting competitive.

The challenge for Britain is to maintain its lead in the face of tough and varied competition, and an increasingly tepid global economic forecast.

Horizons

The British government could be a good role model for other countries as they chart their way on the connectivity map. It has shown foresight by having a long-term strategy and has supported its digital initiatives with appropriate funding.

In 2014 the Government committed to investing £42 million into the Alan Turing Center –for research into the collection, organization and analysis of big data. A further investment of £40 million was announced in September 2015 for the IoTUK program, with £10 million set aside for a single collaborative R&D project in a city region.

The UK public sector has been the biggest adopter of cloud solutions and has set an example for other verticals to follow.

The government’s introduction of G-Cloud has allowed small companies to compete with the larger traditional players for government contracts to supply cloud IT services. Initiatives such as G-Cloud have encouraged bids from smaller IT service providers and are attracting investments to build DCs to serve the rest of Europe.

The government is also investing in the development of 5G mobile technologies with the launch of Europe’s largest academic research center. The UK 5G Innovation Center is the largest European center dedicated to the development of the next generation of mobile services. In an innovative collaboration between the public and private sectors, the center is funded by £12 million from the Higher Education Funding Council for England and more than £68 million from a number of private international telecom groups.

The government has nurtured an environment that supports start-ups and entrepreneurship. For instance, the UK government has recently exempted about 100 DCs from tax on energy usage in order to create a favorable environment for the DC business.

Given how power hungry DCs are, the move has energized the DC market supply side.

Milestones: IoT

In 2014, Innovate UK, the Government’s innovation agency backed a consortium of 40 UK tech companies to create a new open IoT specification that allows machines to work together over the internet, and for applications to analyze data independent of human intervention. As part of the Government’s digital economy strategy, Innovate UK pledged to invest £30 million a year for the first four years (2015-2019) to support innovation in the digital economy. Below are a few examples of companies that have benefitted from this investment:

Crowd Connected has launched its ‘co-locator’ system to aggregate festival-goers’ smartphone data to map behavior and allow organizers to respond accordingly. Their collaboration with Live Nation at Wireless Festival 2014 came after a £25,000 grant and competition win with Innovate UK.

Looking ahead

As a Frontrunner on the Connectivity Journey, the UK is slowly shifting towards augmented innovation, and is therefore in a position to share its experience and expertise in reaching this point on the connectivity path. It has proved by example that a healthy collaboration between government and industry can achieve measurable successes for the economy as well as the technological world.

Additional Sources:

  • UK Seeks Head Start on ‘Internet of Things’,Financial Times, September 2015
  • Virgin Media Challenges BT with Cable Network Extension Plan, The Guardian, February 2015
  • BT is the Champion of Fast Broadband, The Telegraph, March 2016
  • The Future and How to Survive It, Harvard Business Review, October 2015

– Global Connectivity Index

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