Broadband speeds will dive without fibre

The UK risks a future of declining broadband speeds if it does not get its act together regarding next-generation broadband, an analyst has warned.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum keynote seminar on next generation broadband, Ian Fogg, research director at analyst house Forrester Research warned: “"If we get this wrong — which we might do — or if we're slow to do it, tomorrow's broadband speeds may be the same as today's broadband speeds. They may be worse without that investment.

"People use iPlayer, they use World of Warcraft, they use these things more and more and if there isn't the network investment going in, the actual speeds that we enjoy will actually reduce over the next few years. We need to get this right and we need to get this right today."

With regards to speeds for home broadband users, he warned that fibre is the only answer to a “step change” in speeds.

However, he warned that declining prices for broadband in the UK could hinder fibre deployment, as users are becoming accustomed to paying less, not more for their fat pipes.

Fogg said that the problem did not necessarily lie with the consumers, but with ISP’s using marketing to confuse users and make it more difficult to compare process.

"We need to fix this because if consumers don't pay more for broadband, or if they pay increasingly less, the business case for fibre and for investment worsens over time," Fogg added.

While fibre will play a part in the future of Britain’s broadband – telco BT recently announced a £1.5bn investment to give 10 million UK homes fibre access by 2012 — there is a belief that the UK will end up with a 'patchwork quilt' of technologies to deliver super-fast broadband services, rather than one ubiquitous offering.

Anthony Walker, chief executive of the Broadband Stakeholder Group, told the eForum delegates: "We're not going to get one single monolithic NGA [next-generation access]. In the UK we're going to see a number of different networks deployed that will work alongside each other."

Establishing a single standard that all technologies must adhere to would therefore be a critical step to ensuring interproperability, said Clive Carter, principal of strategy and developments at Ofcom.

He advised: “The availability of common standards is going to be fundamental to the delivery of the patchwork-quilt model.”

Malcom Corbett, chief executive of the Community Broadband Network, said that using initiatives for local NGA could be a cost-effective way to bring fibre to areas which may be otherwise overlooked. 

Corbett cited the fibre to the home project in Eindhoven, the Netherland, where Telcos were guaranteed a return on their investments because contracts were signed by local residents prior to the service being built.