Big plans are afoot that will create super-fast broadband in the South Yorkshire region. Julie Hayes asks how this project will create opportunities for local businesses.
Digitally remastered
Big plans are afoot that will create super-fast broadband in the South Yorkshire region. Julie Hayes asks how this project will create opportunities for local businesses
If the internet is a super highway, then it is in the same manner as the M1 is a super highway on a Monday morning – a once state-of-the-art feat of engineering that has become over-run and congested. The copper wires often struggle with exponentially increasing quantities of information from a burgeoning number of users.
In the future, businesses attracted to the region’s offering of digital services, such as the Sheffield Digital Campus or Barnsley’s Digital Media Centre, will put an incredible strain on the existing infrastructure.
On line for investment
South Yorkshire has launched a £112m project to install a super-fast fibreoptic broadband network to every home and business in the subregion.
Jim Farmery, assistant director of business at Yorkshire Forward, says the project will attract investment and enable new ideas to be nurtured in the region. “The biggest opportunity it presents is for inward investors and for them to develop technologies for things like healthcare, video on demand, video conferencing or software, where you pay per hour instead of buying a disk. It makes South Yorkshire an attractive place to come and test those new models out because nowhere else will have the same network capacity we will have.”
Julie Readman, interim chief executive of Digital Region Limited (DRL), says super-fast broadband can be compared to the analogy of electricity – it was originally created to power the lightbulb, but innovators created new needs and new technology to exploit it. While part of the bandwidth will be packaged up and sold to a variety of service providers, other segments of bandwidth will be reserved for the public sector and used by organisations such as the NHS for telehealth and e-learning.
“The NHS could use it to monitor patients with kidney disorders in their homes. Current broadband enables people to download but not to upload at the same speeds – it’s not two-way. If the patient had the diagnostic equipment in the home, with this broadband they could send information back.”
Readman says the super-fast broadband will also enable this technology to be used through television internet for patients who aren’t IT literate, particularly because there is a higher-than-average uptake of cable and satellite television in South Yorkshire, she says. “Elderly people may be afraid of the internet but they are not afraid of the television or remote controls, and these things could be done through the television.”
How fast is super fast?
The project was developed by Yorkshire Forward with Sheffield, Doncaster, Rotherham and Barnsley councils and has attracted £90m of European, regional, local and private investment. It will be led by main contractor Thales UK, alongside Alcatel-Lucent and KCOM. An independent assessment by DTZ forecast the project would create 2,500 jobs in South Yorkshire in the first three years through the growth of the ICT and digital sectors, and up to 4,700 jobs across the region within ten years.
The project guarantees broadband speeds of at least 25MB per second to 97 per cent of premises in South Yorkshire – as long as they want it and have a connection to receive it.
Readman says it is fairly typical for private networks to have headline speeds of 100MB, but the public quote for the Digital Region will be 25MB and above to ensure it meets expectations. She says headline speeds of 100MB mean ‘up to 100MB’ and the actual speed depends on what bandwidth is being used, how many people are using it and how far away the user is from the exchange.
As Jim Farmery, assistant director of business at Yorkshire Forward, explains: “If you’re a small business or householder with a BT-based ADSL service, the headline speed might be 5MB per second, but you would be lucky to actually get that and you would have to live very close to the exchange.”
Farmery says this is a significant amount of public spending, but the public sector would otherwise install its own piecemeal superfast broadband networks for local authority premises and other public sector organisations. And it is unlikely the market will fill the gap.
Fibreoptic cabling is a phenomenon sweeping the UK, slowly and where it is commercially viable. BT launched a £1.5bn programme in July 2008 to give up to 10 million homes access to fibreoptic broadband by 2012, advertising speeds of up to 100MB, and Virgin Media has plans to roll out its 50MB broadband to most of its base, which reaches approximately 50 per cent of the UK. But Readman says: “Our estimate is that if there wasn’t public sector intervention in this, we would be five to six years behind in private sector investment. At best, these programmes might include Sheffield city centre but they wouldn’t have done the rest of South Yorkshire because it’s just not economical.”
Fibreoptic networks already exist in Sheffield city centre. Sheffield-based service provider ask4 installed a fibre ring around the city in 2008 called the Sheffield Fibre Network, which provides fast broadband in student accommodation. The company has just launched subsidiary ask4Business to connect businesses to the ring, too. In cities where there is a critical mass of businesses, it has been viable for commercial operators to install fibre networks on a smaller scale.
But the Digital Region project will connect every street and country farm house in South Yorkshire to its network and service providers can buy bandwidth from DRL instead of installing the costly infrastructure themselves, says Readman. “In the city centre it is commercially viable to do it, but not the case for most of the areas. The Digital Region puts something in for everybody, which has never been done before on this scale in the UK.”