I was really looking forward to attending the BT Vehicle for Change event this morning. After all the invite had said:

The interactive environment at the BT Centre showcase in London has proven to be an extremely successful tool in  helping different organisations and businesses to gear up for a changing world. But it is not always easy to get to London, so BT have developed the Vehicle for Change – an interactive road show that will bring the showcase to customers throughout the UK. 

I sent in my application promptly on the 14th of November and had an immediate confirmation, then nothing until I phoned Oxonline, then quick trip down the M40/A34 but BT weren’t expecting me at the lovely plot on Milton Park, not a good start.

The BT showcase truck looked the part in the damp pot holed car park

I have somehow managed to miss all the Oxonline events so far, for which I apologise to Councillor Roberts who opened the event.

The Councillor gave a brief overview of his BDUK campaign where Oxfordshire have been promised £3m+ providing they match fund it. He has put this forward into next years council budget and is “hopeful”, but this means nothing can be spent until next April at the earliest.

There is also some funding for the Oxfordshire Community Network. My broadband readers will remember the OCN, that great idea of a broadband network linking schools, libraries and public buildings running in a ring round Oxfordshire (but configured in an expensive point to point star configuration). Councillor Roberts mentioned Fire Stations which must be new. In 2002/4 I remember the OCN being trailed by most of the incumbent councillors as Oxfordshire’s way of bringing broadband to the local communities that BT had then chosen to ignore. They couldn’t because, if memory serves, the BT educational products they had used to provide it, at subsidised prices, had contractual clauses that prevented them being used for non educational uses, thus precluding the local business community from entering the broadband era. It looks like those contracts must still be in place as the OCN still cannot be used as back-haul for the rural communities it was intended to serve (though this morning Councillor Roberts blamed the EU).

As Councillor Roberts gave his presentation it brought back memories of 2002/4 when BT needed “broadband champions” to do their unpaid marketing for them and help their local communities have their exchanges enabled for ADSL. I have a certificate from BT Wholesale (before BT Openreach was created) thanking me for my efforts in enabling the Wroxton St Mary exchange (my campaign website is buried on here somewhere, see here.)

The Oxonline website could have been written in 2002/4 with all its statistics on the 80+ exchanges in Oxfordshire 25 of which (urban) BT has enabled for BT Infinity but has few customers. These 25 exchanges are also the ones that have been “unbundled” so other providers can compete -  the cherries in the network.

Then the presentation moved on to BT Next Generation Access:

For the next hour the Vehicle for Change Team will demonstrate some of the relevant cloud based services that can be enhanced by Next Generation Access methods. For example: BT Cloud Contact Centre, BT Compute (a hosted data centre offering), VPOD: The Government Pod which overcomes the communications gap, how it could deliver real benefits for government, by enabling staff to conduct face-to-face interviews without the need to be there in person. Agile working: how technology is an enabler to allow employees to feel empowered and to work flexibly.

It is no wonder that BT have so few BT Infinity customers, after receiving a lovely email from BT Business, yesterday, saying it had arrived in my area (a small rural exchange) well perhaps not

I was so looking forward to hearing where the advantages to NGA were, but the whole presentation could have been done much better on my home ADSL connection. First a static display of a corporate network while the presenter told us NGA saved us all the equipment needed to do Video conferencing that Skype has managed for several years and bits about the Cloud saving on hardware upgrades.

A video conferencing session using Microsoft Lync (the corporate version of Windows Live Messenger). This failed because it seemed the truck was only connected to a 3G signal. Even the local Wi-Fi signal was not used for the video display!

One would have thought that the all embracing BT would have parked the truck where they could just plug in to a BT Infinity connection, perhaps one of their exchange car parks – or are they owned by BT Openreach and not available to the BT department making the presentation.

Then a demonstration of BT Cloud Contact that again can be used on a standard ADSL connection.

So the whole event was a waste of time, I learnt nothing about hi speed internet, multiple concurrent connections, video streaming, HD video conferencing to multiple locations.

Oxonline needs our support but it looks like BT do as well, we have a technology that everyone wants but no one is buying because no one knows what to do with it. Until the “killer application” comes along we will be back in 2002 looking for high speed solutions to problems we didn’t know we had. The “killer application” in 2002 was simple it was “always on” giving rise to all the presence applications that abound today

ps.

From @BBCRoryCJ:

BT welcomes Osborne’s £100m for 10 superfast cities – "BT is already upgrading large parts of these cities…this could help us go further"

See the full story on the BBC website, why oh why do the powers that be give BT money to do things it would do anyway!!

I have just read Nigel Hastilows excellent summary on Advantage West Midlands demise and replacement by LEPS (here on ICAEW ION community site)

One thing  that Nigel’s summary shows is that the organisations wanting to create their own LEPs will have their own agendas and they will all have their own physical boundaries.

Being someone who has lived on the edge of the RDA’s since their creation I am now concerned more by the fact that the LEP’s might not reach all the parts they need to and that we will have a new generation of self inflicted “Not Spots” like we do with broadband.

Having followed the tweets on #bduk and the Broadband Industry Event it all felt like déjà-vu and the same debate held in 2002 when BT would not provide broadband to rural communities because they were having difficulty convincing the 70% of the country that had had broadband available for a couple of years but were not buying into the high speed access. It was the community evangelists of the 30% who provided BT with the information and more importantly the viral advertising network as to what was available once you had 512k always on broadband. This advertising meant that BT could actually sell their moribund product to the urban communities and make even more shareholder return on their inherited infrastructure rather than using the fibre they had planned to install before privatisation.

BT then also delivered 512k to the majority of the rural communities giving those evangelists the same tools as the rest of country. The advertising continued and Government invested to reduce future costs by creating online services on the premise that the bulk of the country had access. But we still have all the not-spots and not all of them are rural.

see this Telegraph article for some numbers "Delay to rural broadband roll out ‘a backward step’"

So now in 2010 where are we, lots of ideas on usage, lots of plans for the urban conurbations to have super fast broadband while no one yet has the killer application.

there were no killer application in 2002, though peer to peer could be one – not a good one for an asymmetrical like ADSL.

But the poor not-spots and the rural communities are in a similar position to that of 2002, a perception from the incumbent suppliers (BT, Virgin and the LLU companies) that the lines will not be profitable. Yet perhaps we should ask BT how much public money they paid back after RDA’s funded investment in rural exchanges that became profitable as soon as they provided ADSL?

The Universal Service Commitment was being asked for in 2002 it has taken seven years for the powers that be to accept that always on high speed access is the same as water and electricity. We learnt today that it will be another five years before we will have a guaranteed 2mb to every household and business. By then the urban community will have super fast broadband as noted in Jeremy Hunt’s  speech today with BT’s investment.

If everyone has a right now to 2mb surely that right will increase by 2015 for the same reasons the powers that be took so long to accept between 2000 and 2010?

Wonder where we would be if Mrs Thatcher had allowed both BT to put in their fibre in 1979 and Murdoch to have his satellite licences rather than allow one monopoly to grow at the expense of the other?

At #BDUK the not spot information was to be made available if you signed an NDA (is it really competitive information, or market failure data?), in the past the Regional Development Agencies would be able to sign those NDA’s and plan their access campaign’s accordingly, now we have to rely on the non existent LEP’s ……

This article should be read “Two key ideas for better broadband”

Two key ideas for better broadband

The government’s Industry Day summit on Thursday to launch its key broadband policies risks missing out on some of the key ideas on how to tackle the UK’s big problems according to Point Topic, the broadband data analysts.
Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, who leads the Coalition’s policy for broadband, has set two main objectives – to make sure that everyone can get at least two-megabits per second broadband by the end of 2012, and to give Britain the best superfast broadband network in Europe by 2015.  The Industry Day is intended to set out the policy in more detail and win industry support for carrying it out.
Tim Johnson, Chief Analyst at Point Topic, is concerned that some of the most important ideas for turning these ambitious policies into reality will not even get discussed at the Industry Day.  Two things he believes are essential if the policy is going to be successful; first, to ensure competitors in the broadband market have access to the information they need to invest in the new networks and second, to recognise that the task is bigger than expected.
One example of where the broadband industry needs to have open access to information is the location of BT’s street cabinets.  Most of the individual cabinets are sitting on the pavement, visible to everyone, but knowing where they all are, across the whole UK, is vital to targeting investment, whether it’s for the “two-meg minimum” or full next generation access.  ………………

This map has way to many red spots…..

They have a bigger version here http://point-topic.com/content/dslanalysis/tfsmj2010.html

USC broadband must be put in place before 2012 not moved out to 2015. As mentioned at #BDUK “Market failure” has been achieved so central funding can be used and a new public infrastructure put together it will after all provide savings across the board of Coalition spending which will improve it for everyone including those that have fast broadband.

The Rural Regeneration Programme run by one of those hated RDA’s has given out £200,000 to Worcester-based Airband Community Internet Ltd to provide high speed coverage across towns in Herefordshire, Shropshire and Worcestershire.

Hopefully the new LEP’s will be able to have access to the same or similar funding in the future for other rural areas like Banburyshire, a rural community surrounding Banbury and currently part of five RDA’s.

the full announcement can be found here:

High Speed Rural Broadband becomes reality as new pilot launched at RRZ Conference

The area around Banbury in five RDA’s SEEDA, AWM, EEDA, EMDA and SWRDA

View Larger Map

David Bailey in his Birmingham Post BusinessBlog has a very good discussion on what we all need to think about before we jump into replacing the RDA’s

After RDAs: Look before you LEP

By David Bailey on Jul 12, 10 11:10 PM in Economics

As days go by we begin to learn more about what the coalition government, now two months old, has in mind in terms of economic development across England.

Leave aside the fact that London can carry on as usual, along with Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, where there is no change to their development agencies. We’re talking of course of the English regions, or rather what replaces them.

What do we know so far?

The Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) that will replace the RDAs will, it seems, have to fund their own running costs, with LEPs bidding into a central pot of some £500 million a year (a quarter of what the RDAs had to work with).

And after Communities Secretary Eric Pickles won out in a Yes-Minister style Whitehall Turf War with Business Secretary Vince Cable, popular RDAs in The North East and West Midlands won’t after all be able to continue. They’re being scrapped, lock, stock and barrel.

As I’ve said in earlier blogs, that’s a mistake as there is much expertise in RDAs like Advantage West Midlands (AWM) which could be used to join up the work of sub-regional LEPs.

And even if a LEP’s territory actually maps that of an old RDA, sadly much of the RDAs’ former work will head back to Whitehall anyway.

…… the rest is here:

http://blogs.birminghampost.net/business/2010/07/after-rdas-look-before-you-lep.html

Should it disappear I have saved it here ……

After RDA’s look before you lep pdf

In Healthcare IT News

Broadband grant to create IT, telehealth jobs
July 07, 2010 | Bernie Monegain, Editor

WASHINGTON – When President Obama announced on July 2 a $795 million government program to develop broadband access in rural parts of the country, it meant an additional 5,000 jobs up front, he said.

Some of those jobs – though the administration did not pinpoint how many – will be in the healthcare IT and telehealth sectors. Obama noted that among the beneficiaries of the government award would be 900 healthcare facilities.

The investment will support 66 new Recovery Act broadband projects nationwide that, according to the grantees, will not only directly create approximately 5,000 jobs up front, but will also help spur economic development in some of the nation’s hardest-hit communities, helping create jobs for years to come. ……..

For the rest go here… http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/broadband-grant-create-it-telehealth-jobs

a retweet from http://twitter.com/cstineman/ via http://twitter.com/cyberdoyle/

Looks like the Finnish are way ahead of us, they have come up with a new law making 1Mbps the minimum for all now and 100Mbps by 2015.

Finland has become the first country in the world to make broadband internet access a basic legal right for all its citizens.

Under a new law which comes into force today, telecommunications companies in the country are obliged to provide all citizens with broadband lines capable of speeds of at least 1Mbps. The Finnish government has also promised the entire population will have 100Mbps connections by 2015.

While broadband coverage in the UK sits at just 73 per cent, Finland is already one of the most connected countries in the world, with as much as 96 per cent of its five million population having internet access. Just 4,000 homes still need to be connected to meet the requirements of the new law.

Finnish communications minister Suvi Linden said the legislation reflected the fact that the internet was no longer a privilege but rather part of everyday life across all strata of society.

“Internet services are no longer just for entertainment,” Linden told the BBC. “Finland has worked hard to develop an information society and a couple of years ago we realised not everyone had access.”

The country’s new law does create a problem enforcing proposed European Union anti-piracy laws, however, which would allow for piracy offenders to have their internet connections cut off. To get around the issue, the Finnish government says it will send letters to suspected offenders.

“We will have a policy where operators will send letters to illegal file-sharers but we are not planning on cutting off access,” Linden said.

In the UK, the roadmap to provide internet access – and in particular access to high-speed broadband services – around the country has become an increasingly high-profile debate, and was a major campaign issue in the recent general election.

The Digital Britain Report lays out the Government’s commitment to provide all homes in the UK with access to web connections of at least 2Mbps by 2012 – though it isn’t guaranteed it by law.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/624802/finland-makes-broadband-internet-a-legal-right-for-all

Going to attend a meeting of the Oxfordshire Digital Inclusion Task Group. Is this 2002 all over again ?