Posted By: Anthony Story Date : 04 Nov 2008 5:35pm
I'm at the Next Gen 08 conference today. Next Generation Access (NGA) is a fairly dry subject, but it's interesting to know how the future of superfast broadband will (or won’t) roll out across the UK. There’s certainly a potential impact for the creative industries – if there’s more bandwith, what would you create to fill it?
The BBC iPlayer is a leading UK example, and staggeringly Youtube is responsible for using as much bandwidth as the whole of the internet traffic in 2002! But it’s not just creativity and entertainment – at least it shouldn’t be. There are massive opportunities for businesses to be exploiting bandwidth in a purely functional way.
The event was organised by Malcolm Corbett and his cohorts at the Community Broadband Network . It struck me that many of topics under discussion, whether it was Government, Regional Development Agencies or business, sounded very similar to the topics being discussed when broadband emerged as a replacement for dialup. The main difference is that people have a more knowledge now, and seem to know more about what they’re talking about – a bit at least!
As before – whilst the discussion is led by the networks (BT, Virgin media, H2O networks etc.), the business case is really led by demand. The real similarity is that no one’s too sure what, if you build a superfast fibre network, it will be used for and by whom?
It was disappointing that, given the subject matter, the conference failed to lead by example. There was no live video stream or second life presence for example - but that’s a quibble. The answer could well lie with a public sector lead. Home-based health care, education, e-government could all play a leading role in creating demand.
David Crowther from Melandra observed that without the introduction of the model-T Ford car and automotive mass-production, we would never have had the out-of-town supermarket. It’s impossible to predict exactly what will happen.
What seemed clear is that the next generation network will become reality. As Antony Walker from the Broadband Stakeholder Group pointed out, it’s not a question of if, but when and how?
There's more about the conference and this topic on the BBC's website.
The BBC iPlayer is a leading UK example, and staggeringly Youtube is responsible for using as much bandwidth as the whole of the internet traffic in 2002! But it’s not just creativity and entertainment – at least it shouldn’t be. There are massive opportunities for businesses to be exploiting bandwidth in a purely functional way.
The event was organised by Malcolm Corbett and his cohorts at the Community Broadband Network . It struck me that many of topics under discussion, whether it was Government, Regional Development Agencies or business, sounded very similar to the topics being discussed when broadband emerged as a replacement for dialup. The main difference is that people have a more knowledge now, and seem to know more about what they’re talking about – a bit at least!
As before – whilst the discussion is led by the networks (BT, Virgin media, H2O networks etc.), the business case is really led by demand. The real similarity is that no one’s too sure what, if you build a superfast fibre network, it will be used for and by whom?
It was disappointing that, given the subject matter, the conference failed to lead by example. There was no live video stream or second life presence for example - but that’s a quibble. The answer could well lie with a public sector lead. Home-based health care, education, e-government could all play a leading role in creating demand.
David Crowther from Melandra observed that without the introduction of the model-T Ford car and automotive mass-production, we would never have had the out-of-town supermarket. It’s impossible to predict exactly what will happen.
What seemed clear is that the next generation network will become reality. As Antony Walker from the Broadband Stakeholder Group pointed out, it’s not a question of if, but when and how?
There's more about the conference and this topic on the BBC's website.
