The new FTTH/B ‘panorama’ is based on September 2019 data collected via network providers and regulators in each country.
Our full report – including a graphic of the table – can be found via ‘Plodding Partners Leave Basecamp’ on the Medium platform.
The project – the reason I was spending so much time on the Island of Ireland – was extraordinary. Breathing new life into an economy wrecked by decades of disregard and battling legions of diehard naysayers was invigorating and challenging. But more than the project itself, I found myself immersed in, mesmerised by, the local way of words – not just the accents but word choices and less inhibited conversational patterns.
Beyond marvelling at the quality of conversations – the highly-valued, hugely entertaining, fast-flowing and oft-surreal ‘craic’ – it was the contrast between Irish English and English English that hit hard between the ears.
Nowhere was this contrast more evident than in the matter of post-qualifiers – verbal reinforcements that bolster or modify statements. To some it was a mild embarrassment but to my ears entirely natural that ‘to be sure’or ‘so it is’ could be twice repeated to hammer home the positive intent. Not so at home in England where negativity was the norm with a single ‘don’t y’know’,‘innit’or in strangled parliamentary speak, ‘is it not’.
That contrast between the double positive and single negative post-qualifiers seemed to speak volumes of cultural variance and, in the context of the project, was a huge contribution to the success of the project and its call for imaginative/brave/fresh thinking.
I was reminded of this when writing ‘Word of the Week: Sophistry’– letting off steam as Westminster wrestles with the consequences of addiction to right-headed (AKA wrong-headed) ideology. A colleague working on the Irish project often complained that if stated three times, falsehoods became normalised and regarded as truth.
Taking a principled stand against sophistry is always a test of leadership – and in its absence huge damage can be incurred. We’ve witnessed that in the promotion of Brexit but that is only the tip of the iceberg. For the moment, in its 70thyear, the NHS has a temporary reprieve but do not doubt that the destroyers have gone away. Meanwhile the BBC remains a popular target and silence fogs the failures of rail privatisations. In that era of post-privatisations, it was, apparently, entirely ideologically sound to silence any criticism of the lack of full fibre until now when the consequences of underinvestment are becoming apparent.
The destruction of decades of public investment on the altar of avarice is rooted in the narrow negativity that prevails over the more forward-looking positivity that we all need to make a difference. To be sure. To be sure.
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In ‘Feeling the Heat’ I describe the green boxes that deliver an apology for broadband as ‘pavement heaters’ – not least because Roadside Radiators might seem just a little harsh.
At the same time it seemed worthwhile explaining why they appear always to be warm, even before they are baked in the sun.
But, however described, these green boxes qualify as rather poor ‘installation art’ – self-demonstrative (and, frankly, boring) monuments that disqualify their owners from any future role as a contributor to economic and social sustainability – or, as Greg Mesch (CEO of CityFibre) would say, lacking ‘the vision, passion and determination to succeed’.
Aided by the Advertising Standards (?) Authority – the folks who misheard ‘Full Fibre’ to be Fool Fibre or Faux Fibre – and Local Authorities for whom the digital dawn has yet to outshine the telephonic twilight – the once vital incumbent has lost the plot.
But, at least homeless souls will have warmth next winter as they shelter next to those green boxes.
Part 2 of our series posted on the Medium Platform reflected on the theme of Connectivity.
As we approached the deadline for publication of ‘Connected With Success‘ the editing pace quickened. An earlier draft drew great suggestions from the Steering Group for the 2018 Intelligent Community Forum’s Global Summit in June.
Fiber optics
First up our friends in the Northwest shouted for inclusion of the Health and Education impacts of future-proofed networks – particularly for remote rural areas. Then we had late confirmation from Sweden that VXFiber’s Mikael Sandberg would also be speaking at the Summit.
But the FINAL final cut was hugely informed by Bruce Katz – co-author of The New Localism. Bruce gave an inspiring address this last week in the Centre for Cities ‘City Horizons’ programme – so the final cut gave voice to a wider view of networking.
Those of us with a background in telecoms are well at ease with the physical (holes, poles and cables) but pay less attention to the connectivity of ideas – the creative fusion when local leaders us their ‘convening power’ to bring talented minds from all quarters to focus on specific local issues.
Regular readers may recall that we reviewed Bruce’s work last October in ‘The NEW New Localism’ but now, six-months on, the willingness of folk to hear and understand his messages about the innovative power of communities is far more firmly established.
And so, in the nick of time, the final cut for Part 2 of this 9-part series balanced technical takeaways with the creative intellectual impacts. In large part that is why the ICF Summit is so very useful – the components are fascinating but it is in their networking that they become hugely valuable.
Next week we are writing about how communities build and maintain a Knowledge Workforce – Part 3 – ‘Where Have All our Flowers Gone?‘ will appear on April 19th – assuming we survive the edit process!
Programme (also evolving!)
Living in a cave – one of many on the edge of Valencia that have been homes for hundreds of years – was not the obvious choice for a visitor to an ultra-high-tech conference.
Then again, something about that enlightened conference was like writing for the samizdat – underground press – digging for stories that must be exposed. And some of those stories, believe me, were about digging.
Gaps in comprehension are a challenge. Even as collective intelligence is facilitated by better digital connectivity the scope for collective ignorance blossoms and curiosity is constrained. The shifting sands of ‘Need to Know’ obscures perception and folks let go of things they’ve not fully grasped.
The cave was, surprisingly, warm and comfortable. Living there was eased by assistance from the owners who lived in the cave next door. It was sufficient. It was a timely reminder that conventional comforts can be recalibrated – and, anyway, the Wi-Fi worked brilliantly!
But I was not in Valencia for historical perspectives. I came to write about business futures. I came to make some small contribution to wider understanding for folks back home blissfully unaware of stuff happening beyond their parish. Stuff that really must be understood – even if it runs counter to their limited experience or unquestioned dogma.
Parochial is a way of describing the silos of specialists. In business and government, as well as in local communities, tribal tendencies need cross-cutting threads to knit together our social and economic fabrics. That need to knock heads together was exposed in my story of the contrast between two technology camps. How is it that experts in telecommunications find it a challenge to talk to each other?
In another way of describing what folks at home are missing, ‘No Valentine from Valencia’ shared what to some in government has long been best left unsaid. But wider comprehension of the real impact of that disregard has still not dawned back home. Where progress is hobbled by lack of vision, only direct experience will lift sights.
The good news for the UK might have been better headlined ‘Digging for Victory’. It wasn’t but, in the heart of the story, the determination to do the job once and to do it properly went a long way to explaining the unexpected accolade.
Three days at an ultra high-tech conference. Four days living in a whitewashed cave. Three stories shining lights on gaps in comprehension. These experiences, and many more, I carry forward to the next great adventure – the influx of folk from around the world to London next June to lift the sights of local leaders from ‘smart cities’ to ‘Intelligent Communities’. You may not know it but really, you should hear about this.
Seven years ago the NextGen Digital Challenge Awards programme was designed to highlight the need for much stronger investment in digital access infrastructures.
The awards were very different from the usual run of industry accolades for people and products.
It took a while but eventually contenders understood that the winners produced brilliant and succinct project case-studies explaining their challenges, solutions and achievements.
Seven years on the rules remain but the field has evolved. Every year the awards categories have changed to include new frontiers.
From the early, narrow, focus on Urban and Rural broadband deployments, the glittering trophies now also recognise innovative endeavours in the use of these utiities. That doesn’t mean any let-up in the push for better digital infrastructures but it does provide great inspiration for project teams grappling with the challenges of making all this connectivity stuff really useful.
We started again this year with the Open Call – to see what sorts of projects would be nominated. Only then were the contenders sorted, shortlisted and invited to submit their project stories for the 2017 selection of awards.
This process keeps the programme relevant – and, whilst some themes continue, others come into focus. Projects that might once have fitted a general ‘Digital Inclusion’ category may now find they are contenders for the Digital Skills Award.
Right now the Finalists for each of seven trophies are just one week away from hearing if their projects have convinced our independent judging panel. The 2017 awards will be presented at a dinner in Westminster on October 23rd.
What is certain is the Digital Challenge Awards programme has once again served up a rich selection of project examples that will inspire and inform – not least because many of these stories will be used in schools, colleges and universities to stretch young imaginations.
The presentation dinner will not only bring these UK project champions together but will also raise the curtain on an even bigger gathering next year when mayors, CIOs and community leaders from around the world assemble in London for a three-day focus on the making (and sustaining) of Intelligent Communities – the purposeful outcomes enabled by ‘smart’ technologies.
Judging by this year’s crop of project endeavours, we will have many great examples to share with high-powered visiting delegations to the Intelligent Community Forum’s 18th Global Summit. And it’ll be the Finalists in the 2017 NextGen Digital Challenge Awards who will be able to say ‘We heard it here, first, on this channel’!
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Notes:
The 2017 NextGen Digital Challenge Awards dinner will be held at 1 Great George Street, Westminster, starting at 19:00. Former MP Derek Wyatt will introduce plans for the June 2018 events. The after-dinner speaker is Iain Stewart MP – Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smart Cities.
The seven 2017 Awards Categories are for exemplars in: Public Service Transformation, Digital Health, Digital Skills, Place-Making, Innovative Projects, Connected Britain and Networking Innovations. The brilliant hand-crafted glass trophies are the work of artist Helen Thomson (Fantasia Glass).
Dinner capacity is limited but requests for any late availability places should be routed to mailto:awards@nextgenevents.co.uk before 20th October.
For earlier commentary on the 2017 Awards Categories see: https://groupeintellex.com/2017/05/30/the-real-digital-trends-revealed-in-the-2017-digital-challenge-awards-programme/
Media headlines continually claim great innovative progress – new systems, new Apps and better services. But, what are the real changes in the UK’s digital landscape?
Hardly a day passes without a flurry of press releases, product announcements, reports and white papers. The spinning rarely ceases even if some digital ideas fly off at a tangent never to return. The realities – the changes that really do impact on the way we work and live – dawn much later.
Long after headline writers have gone hunting elsewhere, some of this stuff is given purpose and made tangible by folks with real challenges to resolve. We all depend on small armies of project teams to work out how to usefully apply new systems and capabilities. They may not attract headlines but they represent the bedrock of reality. These project teams are true heroes and their work deserves to be honoured.
That is why the annual NextGen Digital Challenge Awards programme is designed to celebrate their digital endeavours. It is also why these awards change shape every year to reflect the real digital trends. Now in it’s 7th year, the Digital Challenge has once again adapted the awards to reflect the results of this year’s Open Call for nominations.
Seven Key Transformational Trends
These are the seven awards categories selected for the 2017 NextGen Digital Challenge.
Connectivity no longer distance-dependent
Some of our Award Categories have been consistent over many years. Digital connectivity projects are fundamental and the trophy this year will be called the Connected Britain Award. This year, however, no distinctions need be made between rural and urban connectivity projects. Older distant-dependent designs are no match for ‘Full Fibre’ and fast wireless technologies – often deployed in combination. Cities that once thought they were in the forefront will now need to catch up.
Digital Skills for everyone
For a few years now we’ve honoured Digital Inclusion projects but that, often-traumatic, struggle to get folk online (classically featured in Mike Leigh’s ‘I Daniel Blake’) is now a subset of a far greater challenge – the need for a much wider range of digital skills education to reach across all age groups and all economic sectors. The 2017 Digital Skills Award will celebrate imaginative projects from across the UK.
Networked Innovations – creativity below the radar
Improving the utility of fixed and mobile access to the Internet are background projects. They not only make services more useful and safe but can also cut the cost of network deployment. The shortlisted finalists for the 2017 Networking Innovations Award will severely challenge our judging panel as they reflect on the challenges and achievements.
Digital Health comes home from hospital
This Award Category first came to prominence last year and the current project nominations are further evidence of massive activity in the health sector – and, this year, not entirely dominated by the NHS. The 2017 Digital Health Award will reflect significant shifts in the way the nation’s health issues are being tackled.
Public Services transformed
In contrast to popular myth (and tabloid headlines) it is in the public sector that great transformational projects are powering progress – not just boosting value for money but enhancing service quality. There can be only one winner of the 2017 Public Service Transformation Award but all of the Finalists’ case studies will be an inspiration to others.
Place-Making with lateral thinking
2017 marks the first appearance of an award that recognises the real benefit of digital investments. When project teams pitch for funding they make judgments about investor attitudes and that can lead to over-emphasis on secondary and tertiary benefits. But no longer. The 2017 Place-Making Award is unashamedly focused on the wellbeing of communities – their economic and social development.
Innovative Applications – whatever next
The imagination of creative digital developers opens up new opportunities and a new wealth of insights into how to put digital expertise to good purpose. The Innovative Projects Award will celebrate those endeavors and honour their achievements.
The Shortlisted Finalists for each of these awards will be announced on June 14th at the Connected Britain conference in London.
Each team will be asked to submit their full project descriptions to an independent judging panel in August.
The NextGen Digital Challenge Awards Dinner and Presentation will be held in October.
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Ofcom’s recent ‘separation’ stricture has ensured that BT Group’s annual results presentation to the city gave greater airtime to the leadership of its now semi-detached property, Openreach.
Investors need to understand past performance and assess the forward risks and opportunities. The bigger picture – mighty ships battling against headwinds – was roundly ridiculed as thin cover for self-induced blunders rather than unknowable forces of nature. Could that overall decline, investors might ask, be offset by Openreach’s discovery and ultrafast colonisation of new Gigabit lands?
Last week, the captain of BT’s Openreach gave his crew early warning of a new direction. But his ship’s crew comprises far more than loyal employees – it’s a complex weave of stakeholders including investors and wholesale customers (Communications Providers – the ‘CPs’) – so the occasion provided anxious risk-takers with opportunities to read the runes.
Openreach chief exec Clive Selley was reported as saying; “So it is my job to collaborate closely with all the other CPs to figure out at what pace we roll out the ultrafast platforms. And we are going to do that hand in glove with the CPs, because ultimately they are the ones that are going to have to compete and beat the alt-nets in the market place.”
Inevitably the tech-media headlines shouted ‘Fibre Rethink‘. But the espousal of an enhanced collaborative credo suggests more than relationship counseling. Was this a concern to nip in the bud any hint of a wholesale mutiny or jumping ship? Why so? It’s a reflection of finding a radically different market situation to that for which the CP crew had first been recruited. They signed up to flog phone-lines and ‘leased lines’. Now they need to shift to new services that need far greater reliability and capacity and have little in common with the old voice telephony. The CPs have laboured long with short-term fixes and unlikely performance claims. Now they are increasingly attracted to work with those alternative network pioneers and are held back only by the rate of pure fibre deployments. Meanwhile Openreach still holds to seeing those very different, vastly superior and ‘fit for future’ networks as direct competitors rather than contributors to the greater good.
Other (imaginary) voyages of discovery
Imagine if you will, dear readers, that this is the year 1500.
The good ship Openseas is sailing nervously towards the previously presumed precipitous edge of a flat world – and the crew are mightily troubled by the rumoured fate of earlier voyagers who did not return. On the bridge the captain anxiously scans the horizon but he and his crew are alone. Their resolve to push on can only come from an inner determination. These are complex and confusing seas with shifting currents and a need for confident navigation. With no hope of external assistance they must overcome fears or resign to their fate but they will earn (eventually) the accolade, ‘pioneer’.
And now, friends, imagine that we are in the year 1839.
In the latest episode Dickens’ Fagin is casting around for a way out of social storms on all sides to secure his survival. Desperately he considers the alternatives:
“This rotten life is not for me.
It’s getting far too hot for me.
Don’t want no one to rob for me.
But who will find a job for me,
There is no in between for me
But who will change the scene for me?
…I think I’d better think it out again!
Hey!”
There is, of course, no one to ‘change the scene’ – he alone must choose a new path. To survive, his enterprise must think again to find a new re-formed direction that rejects all previous convictions and missteps along the way. That resolve may be prove to be beyond his reach.
And so, back now to 2017.
Is it any wonder that Openreach is ‘Reviewing the Situation’? Is this the end of ‘the line’ or is this, beamed through pure fibre, a new, low energy, low maintenance, high performance, enlightenment that costs far less and shines far brighter for his enterprise and for the for the entire economy?
So, let’s wrap up this reflection with the answer to a light-bulb joke. It takes only one psychotherapist to change a light-bulb but that light-bulb must really want to change.
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(Musings from Marseille)
The time-lapse shock of grandparents is guaranteed to annoy their youngsters. Much the same effect can be evident when delegates turn up at their annual conference. While they’ve not been paying attention this past year, the world has moved on. And it’s no longer ‘their’ world.
That shock is very much on display here in Marseille at the annual FTTH Council Europe conference. And yes – the youngsters do get annoyed, not least because it takes time and great effort to turn around those giant oil tankers that plough on not noticing (or caring) that that the tide has turned.
But make no mistake; the tide has more than turned. The seas we are navigating have been redefined. The assumptions that have driven businesses along straight lines probably never envisaged buffers at the end of the track.
Here at this fibre-fest the proponents of G.Fast to interconnect with old copper networks inside buildings (not an interconnect from some point halfway to a distant hub) are hearing that the Passive Optical LAN (POL) brigade are intent on eliminating even that last copper thread. For corporates and campuses, the drivers are two-fold – future bandwidth flexibility and vastly reduced energy consumption.
That latter driver is major. Whilst IT departments have been urged to find ways of cutting datacenter energy costs, the internal networks to desktops have been ignored. Optical Networks may reduce energy demands by 80% and that immediate saving has great appeal for the property management sector. It has long been obvious that pushing signals through copper is more difficult than using glass. In the wider networked world, are any network providers offering ‘Green’ access tariff options as are found in energy packages?
Putting a value on future bandwidth flexibility is more challenging but, at marginal cost, few enterprises would choose a cul-de-sac. Come back next year and we’ll probably find that tech-competent extended families will want to create their own software-defined and very private virtual wide area networks – and manage their interconnections with the global web as they wish. And then they’ll not tolerate providers unable to envisage integrated fixed and mobile elements within a shared virtualized infrastructure.
But that’s not all. Even long-standing fibre enthusiasts are finding ‘surprising’ (AKA blindingly obvious) applications that they’d never dared predict. The caution of some investment models has been blown apart by the major service providers – leaving network operators to wonder who will pay for investment in access networks whilst not paying heed to what their customers really need. Do they not realise that once connected (and properly connected) users will use it? No. Provide some half-baked, semi-skimmed, highly asymmetric broadband connection and, surprise, it doesn’t turn them on.
Nowhere demonstrates this as well as Sweden’s 162 local access networks – and wholesale dark fibre opportunities for any enterprise that needs nationwide branch operations. The returns to the investors (often local municipalities) are a godsend to citizens – nobody likes paying taxes. And where did Facebook decide to locate its datacenter? In Lulea, up near the arctic circle, but every bit as well networked as Stockholm and a great deal cheaper. Even their energy bill is reduced in that cold climate. The region also pioneered FTTCP – Fibre to the Car Park – it makes life so much easier for nurses onboard the mobile clinic or library assistants visiting schools. Remote mammography with consultants on demand is way ahead of small UK pilots where (perhaps) a hospital may hook up using Skype for triage work with care-homes and prisons – dramatically reducing the A&E load.
But all that was very evident during our first Study Tour to Sweden in 2013. It takes time for others to hear the messages. If and when they do they’ll probably pronounce themselves ‘”shocked” at the appalling lack of service in, say, rural areas.
The real surprise is that these laggards are, at last, waking up. The truth is out. And the truth is that future optical connectivity is something completely different – with little or no relationship with a past littered with copper wires deployed for some other purpose like analogue telephony.
No wonder the youngsters get annoyed with the ‘so-called’ grandparents. Despite any superficial (or imagined) resemblances, these youngsters were surely born of different stock.
Groupe Intellex 