Hunt tells the UK comms industry to collaborate

Dave Bailey, Computing, Thursday 15 July 2010 at 10:46:00

BIS event will seek to work out details of low-cost UK fibre deployment

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt has warned the UK broadband industry that it
must collaborate to cut the cost of deploying next-generation optical fibre
networks across the UK.

Tomorrow Hunt will speak at a government-hosted conference at the
Department
for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), to hammer out details on how the
UK comms industry might begin to deploy optical fibre in hard-to-reach areas.

Among the presenters at the event will be
Broadband
Delivery UK (BDUK), the organisation launched by the last government in
March.

Ahead of the event Hunt said the UK broadband network was as fundamental to
Britain?s economic success in the digital era as the railway network was in the
industrial age.

Hunt said: "I hope that by the end of this Parliament, this country will
boast the best superfast broadband in Europe and be up there with the very best
in the world."

?Tomorrow I will bring together the key industry players ? [we all] need to
work together on solutions and help make universal broadband a reality,? he
added.

A list of
those
attending has been published on the BIS web site, and includes
representatives from the comms industry, including BT and Virgin Media, as well
as people from utility power and water companies, enterprise network hardware
vendors and rural broadband delivery organisations.

BDUK will launch a research exercise tomorrow exploring how it can remove
the barriers to providing a basic level of broadband to the mainly rural
communities that are not currently connected.

Broadband providers have been asked to examine some real-life examples and
suggest innovative solutions that would work in a number of situations.

BIS will also publish a discussion document on infrastructure sharing
between telecoms companies and other utilities, which could potentially reduce
the cost of building new networks.

Hunt said that there was nothing to stop telecoms or utility companies
sharing their infrastructure, but that very few agreements currently exist.

He announced that three pilot rollouts of next-generation fibre technology
would be implemented, at locations to be announced later in the year.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport will also publish its Structural
Reform Plan later today. This will set out how the government plans to deliver
universal broadband rollout.

BDUK is tasked with taking control of the Digital Britain universal service
commitment to deliver a 2Mbit/s minimum broadband speed across the UK.

BDUK also has management responsibility for introducing next-generation
optical fibre network infrastructure throughout the UK.

Full story at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2266478/hunt-warns-uk-comms-industry