Internet everywhere: Boosting our digital economy

It is generally acknowledged that universal super-fast broadband would benefit the UK’s economy and help close the gap between urban and rural economies and between northern and southern economies.

Ideally the UK would have a universal fibre to the premise infrastructure with extensive high speed wireless resources at the edges of the network. This would mean that all broadband users would be able to wirelessly access internet and other resources at speeds of 1 Gbps from their smartphones, tablets, TVs and other appliances.

Service providers and App developers would find new and creative ways to bring novel services to businesses and domestic customers. But the commercial business cases for investment in universal coverage do not work and the public subsidy required to make it happen is variously estimated at between £10 billion and £30 billion for the fibre networks alone.

The Institution of Engineering & Technology( IET) studied the underlying issue, and recognising that public investment of this size is unaffordable in the foreseeable future, took a different approach. Their key underlying principle is that it is not necessary to have such high speed capacity available everywhere at all times; it is enough if the device or appliance which is using the connectivity finds that it is not constrained in its demands by the network infrastructure in place. This can be achieved by a combination of technical standards, network architecture and smart regulation which work together to organise the demand for bandwidth in real time.

The IEThas produced a policy and strategy paper proposing a new concept DAN, Demand Attentive Networks that is available at www.theiet.org/dan.

In order to focus the debate between network providers, manufacturers, regulators and policy makers, the IEThas defined a number of “Working Assumptions” which are set out in the paper. This could be seen as a to-do list for anyone wishing to implement Demand- Attentive Networks, but it is also more than that. The IEThas tried to determine the top ten or so areas that need attention and invites comments and suggestions of other priority areas.

Ultimately the IETis seeking to drive agreement, amongst all of those with an interest, as to what the top ten areas for action are.

There have been several Government initiatives intended to increase the reach and speed of UK’s broadband networks. The Coalition Government has made large sums of money available to increase the rollout of rural broadband, but taken together with commercial investments this still will result in a broadband infrastructure which delivers 24 Mbps or less to about half of households. The Demand- Attentive Network approach has the potential to deliver a similar economic impact as a conventional fibre-to-the-premise network coupled with 5G mobile and small cell/wifi access but at a fraction of the cost and without the need for large public subsidy.

Currently there is no country in the world which is taking anything like this approach to the delivery of future communications networks. The UK has the opportunity to seize the initiative, generating prodigious economic value for the UK and at the same time enabling the proliferation of creative and novel technology companies.