Manchester Digital Development Agency » nga

Indy networks get sorted: ‘don’t moan, organise!’

Dave Carter — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:33:29 +0000

More than 50 people representing independent digital networks from across the UK got together in London this week to plan the next steps in a national campaign to support ‘bottom up broadband’ initiatives. The Independent Networks Cooperative Association (INCA) was set up two years ago to provide a voice and a vehicle for change whereby community based and other local initiatives to bring ‘next generation access’ (NGA) digital infrastructure to their areas could work together to support each other and encourage new networks to set up. Two years later there are hundreds of local projects and campaigns to bring NGA to rural and urban areas where people and businesses cannot get accessible or affordable access to digitial infrastructure and services. The INCA members and supporters workshop provided opportunities for people to exchange ideas and experiences, especially about the barriers some of them are facing, as well as learn about progress in some of the leading projects in other parts of Europe, including The Netherlands, Sweden and Italy. Plenty of heated debate but also really clear ideas about how to put these opportunities into practice and how to influence government, regulators and local authorities and get them to think, and act, more imaginatively than many are doing at the moment. Many local projects are feeling marginalised as ‘the big players’ make bids to secure public funding for their own take on NGA and are perceived as excluding community initiatives, small companies and the independent sector generally. The overall feeling was (paraphrasing): ‘don’t moan, organise!’ There is a great opportunity to raise this issue at all levels, brief councillors and MPs and get publicity for the ‘bottom up’ approaches. More on the INCA website (as above) soon!

From infinity to beyond

Dave Carter — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:36:37 +0000

Very interesting announcement today featured on the Thinkbroadband site, if you’ve not seen it elsewhere.

“A new collaboration between Fujitsu, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Cisco plans to deliver next-generation broadband to 5 million homes and businesses in rural areas of the UK. Fujitsu will create an open-access wholesale network.”

Plus more here too:
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3273877/fujitsu-announces-15-billion-broadband-fibre-rollout-plans/

What’s going on? Summer Update……

Dave Carter — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:27:51 +0000

Having just got back from holiday (first time to Croatia, fantastic place and time!) it’s time to take (a bit of) stock and think about what’s next for all of our work on next generation access (NGA) digital infrastructure. For the past few months we’ve been ploughing ahead with the Corridor project, more about that later, and waiting to see what might happen with regional funding for a much bigger project which could start rolling out NGA across Greater Manchester. Now that regional funding is ……facing problems (polite term) we are actively looking at alternative and more innovative business models that could find other ways of finding the investment needs to start building an advanced fibre to the premises (FTTP) network across the city region. Now that Metrolink is going to be developed in full, which is great news, there must be opportunities to roll out NGA alongside the new and refurbished tracks. So we are hoping to go “TFON” (you heard it here first), creating a “Tramside Fibre Open Network” which could provide the core of a city-region-wide digital development zone, creating a world class transformational digital infrastructure, with three main objectives:

To safeguard, support and further the Manchester city region’s position as a globally important centre for digital industries in Europe by promoting the development locally of the next wave of digital applications and services that rely on a modern digital infrastructure;
To promote the use of new transformational digital applications and services among the city region’s businesses and citizens, with resulting benefits for business efficiency and social inclusion;
To enable improved quality and improved efficiency in the delivery of public sector services in the city region.

Manchester City Region makes the case for fibre

Dave Carter — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:14:44 +0000

Yesterday at 5pm we finally got the full submission into the NWDA to ask for just under £10M of investment to build a state of the art Open Access fibre to the premises (FTTP) network connecting up as many of the key employment sites in the city region as possible. The MDDA team, together with colleagues from the Community Broadband Network (CBN) and the Commission for the New Economy, have been working flat out on this since the beginning of January and we now believe we have the best possible case to put forward for this. This will now go in for appraisal and then we hope a positive decision will be made by the NWDA Board in March. This all follows the amazing response we got to the launch of the Corridor Fibre project when more than 200 businesses crammed into a room at 8am in the morning and told us, in no uncertain terms, that they wanted accessible and affordable real fibre now, not in 2017. We’re now working in partnership with the company which was the successful bidder from the tender process, Geo, to develop this. The new project will be subject to a separate tender. Watch this space for more info.

and so this is Christmas (nearly)…..

Dave Carter — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:58:09 +0000

Here’s to a Green (and Digital) Christmas! Things are finally beginning to get a little less hectic and we’re starting to plan some great things for 2010. In the meantime the Tech Team have put together a great little time lapse video piece of the view from the Town Hall tower across St. Peters Square and Princess Street which our colleagues at Marketing Manchester picked up on in their Visit Manchester blog (check it out!). We’re still getting lots of interest from the launch of the Green Digital Charter at the Eurocities AGM in Stockholm at the end of November, see the Press Release, under the title “Europe’s big cities go ’smart and green’” in the Press Room of the Eurocities web site. Plus the best stuff is yet to come in terms of our plans for becoming the best connected fibre and wireless city in the UK and our modest objectives of halving the price for next generation access (NGA) business broadband connectivity as soon as possible. 2Mbs for all? More like 2Gbs for all, why limit our ambitions? We’ll be saying a lot more in the new year, starting with the NW Insider Breakfast event on Jan. 15th, more details on the events page of the NW Insider website. I’ll be back next week with more examples of seasonal cheer but until then……

Finland agrees legal right to 100Mb broadband for all by 2015

Dave Carter — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:24:38 +0000

Just come across this fascinating news story from one of my favourite European countries, Finland. As well as gaining the legal right to have at least 1Mb access by next year it has now been agreed that everyone will have the right to a 100Mb connection by the end of 2015. Perhaps even the reindeer will all be on-line by the time the UK gets round to this. Here is the news story:

“Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Finland is the world’s first country to create laws guaranteeing broadband access. The government had already decided to make a 100 Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015. On Wednesday, the Ministry announced the new goal as an intermediary step. Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, says the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Finland is the world’s first country to create laws guaranteeing broadband access. The government had already decided to make a 100 Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015. On Wednesday, the Ministry announced the new goal as an intermediary step. Some variation will be allowed, if connectivity can be arranged through mobile phone networks.” The weblink is here.

BBC story on how home fibre is taking off all around the world, but, once again, not in the UK, yet!

Dave Carter — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:34:18 +0000

The BBC have been consistently good on picking up on these stories, this one last week from the BBC News site, showing that the deployment of the fibre to the home and businesses is surviving the downturn, at least in other parts of Europe. The UK is nowhere near the top ten ‘fibre to the home’ (FTTH) countries, languishing behind: 1. Sweden – 10.9%; 2. Norway – 10.2%; 3. Slovenia – 8.9%; 4. Andorra – 6.6%; 5. Denmark – 5.7%; 6. Iceland – 5.6%; 7. Lithuania – 3.3%; 8. Netherlands – 2.5%; 9. Slovakia – 2.5% and 10. Finland – 2.4%. In fact figures are so hard to come by for the UK, some commentators believe we are not even at 0.1% yet alone at the 1% which is sometime quoted. So much to do, so little time!!

Post Digital Britain

Dave Carter — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:19:43 +0000

It only seems a few days ago that I was enjoying the last of the summer sunshine, thinking I was still on holiday, but in fact I’ve been back for two weeks and I feel I’ve done nothing but catch up on emails, posts, blogs and general updates on where we all want to go with this agenda. There is still a very cautious mood around larger institutions, pondering and ponderous, as someone commented last week. The really exciting stuff, yet again, is coming from small businesses and the voluntary and community sector. There really does seem to be a renewed commitment to making things work for themselves/ourselves and there are some great ideas knocking about, Software Freedom Day taking place this Saturday, being one of them. We’re continuing to work very closely with the Community Broadband Network and it’s worth checking out the “Scenarios for NGA”, i.e. Next Generation Access broadband networks, piece that they’ve just republished on the website. Next week I’ll be over in Amsterdam to meet with colleagues rolling out the City-Net fibre to the premises project and also the Amsterdam Living Lab to find out how they’re getting on and what we can learn from their experience. For those who say it’s impossible to do this in the UK I’ll stick with my favourite answer, ‘the difficult we try to do immediately, the ‘impossible’ simply takes a little longer…’.