Net gains from faster broadband

Today, Scott Sellars is able to transmit and receive data on his home personal computer 3,000 times faster than he could 20 years ago.

Superfast broadband delivery won’t mean anything to those who don’t have a personal computer; but to businesses and individuals who want a greater and quicker capacity to transmit and receive information on the internet, it’s the future. It all comes down to capacity and speed.

“Broadband is the difference between an old-fashioned narrow waterpipe and a drainage pipe, a minor road and a motorway. It offers you greater capacity and greater speed,” Mr Sellars added.

He’s the man at Bradford Chamber of Commerce who deals with things like broadband and the internet. He’s the Chamber’s online services executive.

Although the Government and local authorities in West Yorkshire are investing in making superfast broadband more widely available, it is thought that up to 132,000 homes and premises in West Yorkshire are either poorly served or, worse, are getting no service at all.

Why this is happening is open to interpretation. MPs on the House of Commons public accounts committee believe a lack of competition among broadband suppliers has led to the monopolisation of sub-regional contracts, which may explain why development has been slow in further-flung areas such as Keighley Moor, Oxenhope, Ilkley Moor, Cleckheaton and Batley.

According to Superfast West Yorkshire, which is the marketing brand name for the West Yorkshire Local Broadband Project: “The project commenced in September of 2013 and is due to be completed by July 2015. Our infrastructure partner BT will commence their engineering survey work of exchanges and cabinets shortly – which will take approximately six months to complete. The work to upgrade West Yorkshire’s digital infrastructure, under this project, is expected to commence in the Spring of 2014.”

The project aims to help improve broadband coverage across West Yorkshire – focusing on those areas which have either no or poor coverage. Many rural and remote areas have poor broadband because they were not deemed commercially viable by telecoms infrastructure providers.

Dr David Rhodes, formerly boss of high-tech company Filtronic plc when it was based at Saltaire, said: “Perhaps it’s a matter of how many customers you can link up to. If a supplier can’t get that many it may not be worthwhile to do it.”

If that’s true, MPs are unlikely to live with that for very long in a competitive world. The talk is of a £10 million scheme to develop new technologies to deliver broadband – wireless signals transmitted through the air rather than by cables underground, for example.

Mr Sellars said he had heard that in Germany overhead power cables were used to transmit broadband. Is that likely or even possible?

Dr Rhodes said. “You can do it, but it’s a fix, not a solution. It’s a complex question.” he said. At his Isotek Oil and Gas underwater pipe-repairing company between Bradford and Leeds, he said he had two buildings linked to one another by wireless broadband, but the buildings were only 30 yards apart.

His own home in Menston is an estimated 300 yards from where more productive fibre-optic cabling joins telephone copper cabling, yet he said he could still get 100 megabits of speed through the telephone wires.

So why is there a problem elsewhere, in the less built-up areas of the district?

Mr Sellars said: “It’s easy to say faster is better. I guess it’s what people are trying to access. In the year 2000 people were getting into video conferencing, but you had to go to a local library for the right equipment because they were the only people who had decent broadband.

“These days, businesses are expecting to communicate faster online. This isn’t just a matter of a telephone conversation between two people, it’s a connection between half-a-dozen.

“In South-East Asia they have huge broadband speed. They expect everyone to be at their speed. If that’s not the case you could lose business.

“Ten years ago we didn’t have people using Facebook and Twitter. But now everybody is wanting to access them. People want to send bigger family photographs online.”

How fast you can do this, and how much you can do, depends on the quality of your computer and how near or far you live from one of those green box exchange stations you see in the street.

BT reputedly used to say that beyond a quarter of a mile it would be difficult to get really good broadband. Copper telephone wires, through which broadband signals are transmitted, have less capacity than fibre-optic cabling.

Urban areas of the district are probably better equipped in this respect, hence the delays still being experienced in more rural areas nearly four years after the Coalition Government launched its Britain’s Superfast Broadband Future initiative.