Superfast Broadband - Evidence - Parliament

Miles Mandelson and Rory Stewart MP – oral evidence (QQ 430-465)
financial skills and experience, and sufficient scale, and if you have found a way to get
backhaul into your area in an affordable manner, and you have enough people willing to put
their hands in their pocket and buy shares in that enterprise, then you can do it. There is an
organisation called Broadband for the Rural North, which is operating in Lancashire, and it
might be worth your while taking a look at what they are doing. They are still in the early
stages but the potential is enormous, and they plan and undertake to deliver 1 Gbps to every
household. So potentially it can be done.
Q449 Earl of Selborne: I would just like to follow up the interesting examples you have
given of the opportunity that wireless has to provide a service. It will not be superfast
broadband to remote rural areas, and that is what the whole discussion is about. We are
about to have an auction for 4G services. So if you can achieve a decent backhaul, if you can
plug in your fibre optic to the mast, and if you recognise that hills and wet trees, as you said,
are a complication, nevertheless there is an opportunity to get some quite respectable
speeds. I think most people would think that 20 or 30 is perfectly adequate. Is this not the
main opportunity to avoid these vast costs that we are talking about to get to these rural
areas? Is it really necessary to achieve super broadband?
Rory Stewart: Okay, can I come in just quickly before Miles answers this? There are two
separate issues: one of them is the 4G rollout, which is really a cellular solution, which will
be delivered either over the 800 or 1,800 Mhz spectrum out of a mast by Everything
Everywhere or Vodafone, or any of these providers, and the kind of wireless solution that
Miles is talking about, which is essentially a wireless solution coming out of the end of a fibre
optic cabinet. One of them—the former, which is the 4G spectrum—would run from
devices like this [shows a mobile phone] or perhaps you could connect a laptop to it. The
other would be more of a kind of conventional broadband service that you would find in
your home. We had enormous success with an LTE [long term evolution] trial of 1,800 Mhz
at Threlkeld, where we are receiving speeds of between 35 and 40 Mbps, and we launched
that about four weeks ago.
There are a number of issues around that. There are contention issues—in other words
how many people in that cell who are using it can rapidly drive down the speed that you can
get—but the technology is improving all the time. There are costs and maintenance issues.
Again, it is quite difficult to persuade the companies that it is worth their while running a full
4G service off a mast in a very remote rural area of Cumbria. It is actually no cheaper for
them to do that than over fibre; in fact, it is considerably more expensive in terms of annual
running costs than having installed the fibre backhaul to do that. But there are solutions for
that too. One of them is to force the companies in the 4G spectrum auction to cover 98%
of rural areas as part of their contract in signing up for that auction. Ofcom looks like they
are now moving in that direction from 95% up to 98%. The second thing is the Chancellor
has put about £150 million from the Treasury into building the masts, which will also reduce
that cost. There are other things that we can do too. The white space spectrum is a
different sort of solution from the solution where you go off the masts. There is a little bit
that you could be doing with satellite. In the end we are going to have to have a range of
these different solutions coming in.
But I would be a little bit hesitant in saying that there is somewhere out there a silver bullet
in the form of 4G that can actually deliver the kind of consistent high-speed services that you
would need in order to deliver public services over the next five to 10 years. I think you will
have to continue doing a lot of the kind of things the masts have done.
Q450 Earl of Selborne: It is a contribution, surely?
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