Superconnected Cities – A huge opportunity for wireless

In 2011 the government site aside £100m with the aim of creating ten “Superconnected Cities” all across the UK. In 2012 another £50m was added to this fund to allow more cities to be connected. The original idea was for the cities involved to invest in the broadband infrastructure by building new high speed networks. The first city – Birmingham – was given £10m to improve connectivity in the city for residents and businesses, however this was not going to run smoothly. BT and Virgin, who have both already invested heavily in Birmingham and other cities, mounted a legal challenge claiming that the project amounted to ‘state aid’ of their competitors. Birmingham’s planned build would have been right on top of BT and Virgin’s networks and the complaint was upheld. UPDATE: the Government has released “options for wireless connectivity” for the program.

The Revised Plan

Earlier this year the government abandoned it’s original plans, state aid rules would simply not allow it. The revised proposal is to now provide £90m in vouchers for small and medium sized businesses to enable them to procure a ‘step change’ in broadband connectivity. The original plan was for connections to be around 80-100Mbps, the new plan is not precise in what qualifies as a step change but it expected to be over 30Mbps. The remaining £50m is to go towards large public WiFi projects. Customers with a balance sheet of no more than £36.5m or a turnover of less than £42.4m and fewer than 250 employees will be eligible to claim a voucher of between £250 and £3000. The trial cities are Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Manchester and Salford and will run until the end of September. After this the scheme will be rolled out fully.

The Opportunity for Wireless

For the first time in one of these sort of government initiatives, wireless is specifically included as a connection method. The voucher is paid directly to the ISP and covers the capital cost of connection and this specifically includes wireless equipment (antennas, cables, brackets etc). We already work with a number of ‘urban’ ISPs and provide a range of solutions to them. Of particular interest is our range of 60/80GHz wireless bridge links that are capable of providing up to 1Gbps wirelessly on a single link up to 3.5km line of sight. This allows ISPs to rapidly deploy new networks and ‘land grab’ new customers in what is going to become a competitive market. Those who wait for costly fibre networks to be installed, or for Openreach to enable FTTC, are going to miss out. In fact, stories are starting to emerge (such as at the recent National Audit Office enquiry into BT and the BDUK program) that BT are avoiding enabling FTTC in areas where there are a lot of business customers. This may be because that they do not want to cannibalise their lucrative leased line business! 60 & 80GHz wireless links are perfect for city networks as they operate away from the heavily used 5GHz spectrum, operate license free or for a very small annual cost, offer very high throughputs and are very small form factor so will not usually require any planning permission (such systems are generally classed as ‘de-minimis’).

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