Alan Srbljanin, Transport & Connectivity Advisor EMDA, presents at NextGen 09 in Leeds on 16 and 17 November 2009

1. Digital Britain - are we on the right track?…
Next Gen09
Leeds, Royal Armouries, 17th Nov 2009
Dr. Alan Srbljanin, Transport & Connectivity Advisor
~ A Personal View ~
alans@emd.org.uk 0115 988 8562
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2. We are already living in a Digital Britain
We are connected at home and at work and increasingly on the move.
As citizens, we shop online buying books and holidays, we bank, we
pay our rates, we study our ancestry, we renew our passports and
we buy our car tax. The public sector gives us telemedicine, mobile
phone parking tickets and the Oyster card. As businesses we
complete electronic tax returns, we trade online, we operate across
continents, across time zones and along complex supply chains. …
We do all this and many more things beside in our digital world. We
can confidently say we are already living in a Digital Britain.
(source: RDA response to Digital Britain, Mar09)
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3. Are we on the right Track?
NO ...we are on the slow track
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4. But how much speed do you need?
I haven't got a clue...but fibre can deliver it...
…in April 2009 average broadband speeds in the UK were 4.1Mbit/s,
which was equivalent to 57% of the average advertised headline
speed. … Actual speeds were significantly lower in the peak
evening hours. Average speeds between 8pm and 10pm were
3.7Mbit/s (source: Ofcom, UK broadband speeds 2009:8).
…the first commercial fibre optic connection in April 1977 in Long
Beach California was 6 Mbit/s requiring 2 fibres, one for each way of
communication. … At the moment there are systems commercially
available that allow the usage of 160 colours on a single fibre, giving
a total of 3.2Terabit/s on a single fibre. In laboratories speeds of up
to 25Tbit/s have been reached (source: OECD, Developments in fibre technologies &
investment, Apr08).
The fastest residential broadband offer in the OECD in October 2008
was 1 Gbit/s from the Japanese operator K Opticom
(source: OECD Communications Outlook 2009:107).
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5. My Broadband Manifesto for the UK
In descending order of desirability:
 Fibre to the Premises – PTP
 Fibre to the Premises – GPON
 Fibre to the Cabinet
 ADSL and variants
 Long Range Wireless
 Satellite
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6. We don’t move forward by looking backwards
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7. We don’t move forward by looking backwards
 "I think there is a world market for maybe five
computers." (Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943).
 "Computers in the future may weigh no more than
1.5 tons.“ (Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of
science,1949).
 "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in
their home." (Ken Olson, president, chairman & founder of Digital Equipment
Corp., 1977).
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8. We don’t move forward by looking backwards
This is a commercial market with quite a lot of players and it obeys
normal economic drivers…[there]…are large pieces of geography,
sparsely inhabited, where broadband roll out will not be achievable in
economic terms at least within 10 and possibly 20 years.
(source: Sir Christopher Bland, BT Chairman, evidence to Select Committee on Culture, Media and
Sport 5th Feb 2002)
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9. The future will not be like the past
The Laws of Disruption, Larry Downes, (2009)
MOORE’S LAW METCALFE’S LAW
computing power doubles every the power of a network increases
year or so exponentially with each new user
No one knows how much bandwidth we will need in the future
but you can guarantee it will be more than now.
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10. End note…
You don’t need to speculate about a Digital
Britain we live there already.
A pilot is not a plan. We should be putting
in place the building blocks of a
Next Generation Digital Britain
The UK needs a fibre manifesto NOW.
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