Mobile Broadband 2010

Wednesday September 29th, 12.05pm

Does Mobile Broadband provide a good investment opportunity?

• Where do the opportunities lie in the MBB ecosystem?
• How has MBB affected smart phone, devices and components markets?
• How do you quantify the growth in embedded and connected applications and M2M services?

Panellists Include:
Antoine Pradayrol, Head of Telecom Operators Team, Exane
John Yeomans, Director, First Capital
Peter Curnow-Ford, Chairman, Bluenowhere

Wednesday September 29th, 3.40pm

Outlining the business case for deploying WiMAX for Mobile Broadband

This session will look at the environments and regions that suit WiMAX and evaluate the success of previous deployments
Peter Curnow-Ford, Chairman, Bluenowhere

Will an investment in wireless broadband accessible in every village make a difference? By whatever means, it will come.

• How will this change the ways you do business?
• How will it change the ways that services are provided (by the Council or whomsoever)?
• How can you make money from it?
• How can you save money because of it?

In this Anglesey Business Week event we will explore some answers to these questions and identify future opportunities. We will experience a practical exploration and start to develop concrete proposals.

More information

FibreSpeed has the potential to transform the Isle of Anglesey into a vast “wireless hot-spot” giving super-fast Internet access to many of its businesses and residents.

At this special presentation, part of Anglesey Business Week 2010, you’ll find out what this would mean for you, and how you can be part of it.

You’re invited to attend the presentation on Wednesday 22^nd September from 9am at Carreg Mon Hotel, Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Anglesey, LL61 5YH

From 9am to 10am there will be three short presentations:

FibreSpeed is a growing fibre-optic network delivering next-generation Internet access to North Wales. Sales Manager David Ferguson will give the latest update on its progress and describe how users are already benefiting. He will explain how FibreSpeed technology improves on so-called “fast broadband” and how it could transform business on Anglesey.

Bluenowhere is a new FibreSpeed service provider offering wireless connectivity across Anglesey. With support from Anglesey County Council and the Welsh Assembly Government, Bluenowhere wants Anglesey’s businesses and residents to connect to FibreSpeed and enjoy the kind of high-speed Internet service usually reserved for urban areas. CEO Harry Aldridge will outline this vision, and will explain the steps to achieve it.

Integratek Managing Director Chris Grasby will explain in a way that’s easy to understand how FibreSpeed technology can be used to transform your business. He will talk briefly about the benefits of “cloud computing”, also known as “virtualisation”, and how you can use the Internet to improve the way your business functions. Integratek is an established FibreSpeed service provider offering connectivity and equipment solutions.

From 10am to 11am you can chat personally to the experts and get answers to your questions. You’ll also have the opportunity to network

RSVP details:

To reserve a place at this free event email fibrespeed@sbarc.net or register on line at or fill in our enquiry form



We have announced our plans to roll-out a WiMAX wireless broadband infrastructure in Anglesey and surrounding areas, following some 10 months of work supported by the Isle of Anglesey County Council, FibreSpeed, and the Welsh Assembly Government.

We chose to announce this today because the Welsh Assembly Government is running a session at the Anglesey Show to raise awareness of their Broadband Support Scheme, and we are linking in with this to let people in Anglesey and the Mon a Menai region know our plans for investment.

We have announced a notspot registration scheme and are inviting people living in notspots in Wales to come and ask us to produce proposals to bring broadband to their community. We are very confident that in almost all circumstances we can deliver the best solution – offering the best speed/quality/price combination.

It is an extremely exciting project, and I am very grateful to the enthusiasm and determination of Anglesey Council, FibreSpeed and the Welsh Assembly Government, who are helping us to make this a reality.

Watch this space!

Download our press briefing in English or Welsh

Bluenowhere has developed plans, as a FibreSpeed Service Provider, to establish a new, open access, wholesale broadband infrastructure allowing new and existing retail service providers to reach homes and businesses currently unserved by broadband or receiving poor broadband. The scheme also has the support of the Isle of Anglesey County Council and is seen as a further step towards enhancing the broadband infrastructure of Wales which is a key objective of the Welsh Assembly Government.

Bluenowhere is seeking to take advantage of the Welsh Assembly’s £2m “Broadband Support Scheme”, to accelerate and expand the deployment of our network to cover the more commercially unviable communities in the region.

Harry Aldridge, CEO, Bluenowhere says “We warmly welcome the launch of the Welsh Assembly’s ‘Broadband Support Scheme’. We are today inviting individuals and communities to register their interest at notspots.bluenowhere.net, so we can engage with applicants and propose a solution to extend our state of the art network into their community as soon as possible”.

“Broadband has become the “4^th utility” and is now as important as access to water, electricity, and gas. Those unable to take advantage of the social and economic benefits broadband offers will become increasing excluded unless steps are taken to tackle availability. Bluenowhere is delighted to have the support of the Isle of Anglesey County Council in making available council sites and assets to support our deployment and in their commitment to tackle digital inclusion.”

Download our press briefing in English or Welsh

The ability to make this a reality in the short term aside, any such move means that as a matter of necessity every citizen must be able to access adequate broadband to take advantage of these services.

Renewing your car tax online with the DVLA is an extremely quick and easy process, for example, but as more services increasingly move online and require broadband connectivity, the gulf between those who have broadband and those who don’t will grow significantly, leading to increasingly severe digital and social exclusion.

How we upgrade our infrastructure to deliver universal broadband connectivity is an issue that is fast rising up the political agenda and becoming an election issue.

The end goal is Fibre To The Home (FTTH), and in the long term this will be necessary to achieve. However back in the present, in many parts of the country, predominantly rural areas where existing broadband provision is also poor, the cost of deploying a shiny new FTTH network is unviable in the economically prohibitive extreme.

Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) may be viable in certain areas, but predominantly in urban clusters where existing broadband provision is generally ok and not in the more rural areas or edge-of-town communities.

The truth is that in order to deliver on the Government’s 2Mbps Universal Service Commitment, and to raise the level of broadband service across the board in all parts of the country, will require a patchwork of technologies including Fibre, Wireless and Satellite. It is therefore imperative that any regulatory framework takes the necessity of a technology patchwork into account, and that any funding for Next generation Access does not exclude particular technologies.

The Conservative commitment is designed to usurp the Government’s 2Mbps “Universal Service Commitment” by 2012, but remains ambiguous only going as far as saying 100Mbps would serve “the majority” of homes. Well, with Virgin Media already delivering 50Mbps services today, and BT offering its 40Mbps services in some areas, a vague pledge to reach 100Mbps in 7 years time is hardly a significant announcement.

Today, however, BT has offered up some meat and stated its willingness to open up its passive infrastructure to competitors. This undoubtedly improves on the openness of any network, and affords rivals greater flexibility through vertical separation in the network. However it, nor the Conservative proposals address the real issue of the Digital Divide.

“We told Ofcom last year we’re willing to provide open access to our ducts and poles and we are working with them on how to achieve it. Other companies already have access to our exchanges, so we’re relaxed about providing them with another form of access as well.”

Widespread broadband availability is a good thing. Widespread take-up is even better. However fibre is expensive, and the costs of rural deployment are prohibitive. The key challenge at present is bringing high speed and high quality broadband services to these areas and narrowing the gap between the have’s and have not’s.

For all the competition in the urban fibre networks, it means nothing for those ‘last 10%’ (or more in Bluenowhere’s view) of customers beyond the reach of fibre. It is interesting to see the comments below Rory Cellan-Jones’ post which talk of 4G and WIMAX, because terrestrial wireless is the only viable infrastructrue solution to cost-effectively reach these communities.

If the Government, or Conservatives, want to explore how to deliver a meaningful broadband agenda, they should direct their attention at supporting the most excluded receive access to broadband. In urban areas where fibre is economic the market can take care of itself; it is the rural areas where the economics are tough that ought to be the focus.

The GSM Association (GSMA) has predicted that total Mobile Broadband subscribers in key European markets will rise from about 22 million at the end of 2009 to over 43 million in 2011. The organisation has also appeared to throw its weight behind Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology for use in next generation Mobile Broadband networks.

It’s not real surprise to see the GSMA backing LTE considering it comes from a 3GPP pedigree and is expressly designed to meet the backwards compatability requirements for established networks.

What is of interest, however, and quite encouraging, is the mobile broadband price comparison which places the UK as the most competitive in Europe…

Among Europe’s major markets, the highest charging countries for Mobile Broadband are France, where 4GB (GigaByte’s) of data can cost a subscriber almost £76 a month, and Germany, where subscribers can pay £40.27 for 1GB of data! The least expensive Mobile Broadband in the top five markets is, yes you guessed it.. the UK; competition here is fierce and subscribers often pay less than £15.21 a month for 3GB.

For direct comparison these prices work out, per GB, at £19, £40.27 and £5.07 for France, Germany and the UK respectively. Quite an astonishing differential.

As for the future, O’Hara predicts that HSPA+ (44Mbps) and next generation 4G LTE services (150Mbps to 1Gbps; though initial deployments are often considered to be more 3.9G than 4G) will see increased rollouts offering faster speeds.O’Hara believes that such services will even “compete with fixed line broadband offerings,” though we doubt that would be the case, at least until current capacity problems can be solved. Presently many services in the UK offer speeds of 3.6Mbps to 7.2Mbps but most have trouble delivering just 1 – 2Mbps.

The cynicism of the author is well placed. For a number of reasons 3G is not a viable fixed-line broadband replacement, not least of which is the fact that, irrelevant of technology, the underlying network architecture is designed to serve customers in a highly mobile environment with high quality voice.

Attempting to serve high bandwidth connections reliably to fixed or portable devices, with a network that is inherently designed for mobile voice will always be a challenge. Further issues such as cell backhaul limit the ability of the networks to deliver high capacity connectivity.

Elsewhere the GSMA has said that licensing of the 2.6GHz band will be critical to unlocking the benefits of global scale economies in Mobile Broadband markets. 2.6GHz is designed for use by both next generation Mobile Broadband candidates ( LTE and WiMAX ), though the GSMA appears to be following operators, the EU and even some regulators by mentioning only LTE in its update.If we’re really lucky then Ofcom might eventually auction off is 2.6GHz spectrum spaces too, but we’re still waiting for that and the wider Digital Britain report proposals to reach fruition.

WiMAX is often unfairly left out of the picture, ususally by those embedded in the traditional mobile industry. However, just because mobile operators may be going down the route of LTE does not by logical inference mean WiMAX has no place. Indeed quite the opposite.

WiMAX is available today as a commercially deployable technology, whereas LTE is not. WiMAX was designed first and foremost for data, and to do data well. WiMAX has no baggage such as awkward and costly work-arounds for backwards compatibility with previous-generation networks either.

Ultimately the choice of technology rests on what you are trying to achieve. If high capacity, ‘outdoor’, fixed and mobile broadband capability is what you require, then WiMAX is market-ready today!

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