Electronic Communications (Universal Service) (Broadband) Order 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-06-05
Topic: Technology
Alastair Bruce (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I add my support to the Motion of the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, and I share his concern that the proposed broadband universal service obligation is disappointing. I have not studied the helpful documentation accompanying the order in great detail but my overall reaction, as someone with a home in west Wales—I am following the script set out by the noble Lord at the beginning—with no current mobile telephone coverage and rather limited broadband options, is that the situation of myself and others in the same boat is unlikely to be much improved by the USO as proposed. I welcome the principle of the USO and the fact that it includes a minimum upload speed as well as a minimum download speed, but 1 megabit is not enough One of the great potential benefits of universal broadband, as we have heard, is that it makes it possible to run a small or even medium-sized business from anywhere in the country, however remote. However, such businesses depend at least as much, if not more, on their ability to upload data to their customers and partners as on being able to download material from the internet. Unlike private users, they are less likely to spend time and bandwidth downloading films, videos and social media postings. I recognise that full fibre, much as I would welcome it—either right to the premises or, indeed, to anywhere reasonably nearby—is unlikely to reach all of the rural areas where many of the 5% of premises not currently receiving superfast broadband are located. What will the order do to promote the development of new approaches and technologies that can reach those locations? It seems to me that far too much reliance has been placed on Broadband Delivery UK, Openreach in particular, to achieve the 95% coverage, using largely old-fashioned technologies with limited expansion capability We were rescued from a BT Broadband service that rarely, if ever, reached 0.2 Mbps by a local ISP, appropriately called ResQ, which offers a line-of-sight fixed-wireless service with speeds of around 10 Mbps for both download and upload. Surely it would be better to incentivise and promote competition in developing new approaches, whether based on fibre, fixed wireless, satellite or even the use of 4G mobile networks, with the capability of reaching premises everywhere in the UK with speeds more like 30 Mbps than the 10 Mbps in the order. Members of your Lordships’ EU Internal Market Sub-Committee who visited the Harwell space centre recently heard from a smallish satellite company with plans to offer global high-speed broadband coverage via satellite. There are opportunities to explore technologies other than fibre I note from the Government’s impact assessment that a USO specifying 30 Mbps download and 6 Mbps upload could reach 2.6 million premises in scope, as opposed to 1.05 million for the proposed approach. That is well over double the number of premises able to access superfast broadband for a relatively modest extra investment Finally, I ask the Minister to explain how the USO will actually be enforced. If I am not getting my 10 Mbps, what do I do? How soon must the service be provided and by whom? I also note with concern that if it costs more than £3,400 to provide it, the end user—that is, me—is going to have to pay the extra The UK is already a considerable way behind many other nations in its rollout of truly high-speed broadband. In my view, the introduction of the USO, which is indeed welcome in principle, should be grasped not as a way of trying to catch up a bit but as an opportunity to get ahead and to open the doors to all the potential internet-based applications of the future. We do not know yet what those will be but we can be pretty sure they will require more broadband capacity, rather than less.