This week I went to hear a presentation in Nottingham by a project a little closer to actuality that the recent 2012 Design Capital bid I recently blogged about.
Ultraband is a public sector non-profit partnership led by Connected Nottingham whose current mission is to create a high-speed broadband ring hooked around central institutes in Nottingham (including Broadway and Biocity). The network will enable businesses with high speed broadband needs, particularly in the media industries around Nottingham’s Lace Market, to access high fibre pipes to ail the curent creaking, high capacity broadband network which will be essential for the productivity of businesses in the future.
According to a survey they conducted which you can still fill out online (and you probably should as they’re basing their findings on just 23 responses currently) 71% of Lace Market businesses were unhappy with their internet, and had problems with bandwith and connectivity that prevented service delivery – including outsourcing rendering projects.
If the Lace Market wants to become a creative hub, competing with the net access offering of other European regions like MediaCity Salford, Amsterdam and Paris is essential.
The service would be operated on a non-project co-operative basis, which is how many Scandinavian high speed networks have been established. However it’s subject to approval of an EMDA bid which could become a longwinded process. Director Peter Goodwin was keen to point out that if we didn’t reach a decision on moving forward within a year the opportunity would be lost and with it competitive advantage for Nottingham.
I don’t know too much about this kind of technology and the pros and cons, but from speaking to others it would seem that high-speed is available already – though price may be an inhibitor. A rep from BT was also vocal about a network run by “over enthusiastic amateurs” – assuring us it’s not about the fibre in the ground which already exists but the support and connectivity provided by the service provider.
With Virgin’s announcement of a rollout of 50Mb high speed broadband for the very affordable £51 month, I’m still left confused as to whether we are missing out on an opportunity to do something radical that addresses a market failure (which is, or should be, after all the point of Regional Development Agency money) or whether the market is actually already advancing in serving the needs of the few for whom ‘big pipe’ access is an imperative.
Yet any infrastructure that makes Nottingham more appealing to incoming investors and retains the high tech businesses we have could be crucial in survival. But what is it we need most right now in the recession – the telecoms networks or the business networks?
Ultraband are also keen to raise awareness and garner views about the project in the inner-city Nottingham business community. A blog strategy perhaps?
Thanks for the coverage Susi.
To answer the query over Virgin’s 50Mb offering, that service is (a) consumer only (not business) and (b) contended between 200 and 500:1, i.e. you could end up seeing very little of that 50Mb! It’s all marketing…
Genuinely high speed internet connectivity is available if you can afford it – and we’re talking in the order of about £1000 per month for a 10Mb dedicated line. You would certainly notice the difference over “normal” broadband, as you wouldn’t be sharing that capacity with up to 50 others, but it’s still not real next generation speed (50-100Mb) and of course it is prohibitively expensive to any small business whose very existence isn’t predicated on such a connection.
That’s why Ultraband is so important – we need to bridge that gap between the current creaking network used by the majority and the vast sums charged for the superior fibre networks that, as BT point out, do already exist but (as they don’t point out) are far too expensive for the majority.
How that works in practice is still being debated, but there are certainly a number of options and none of them involve “enthusiastic amateurs” I can assure you!
Thanks for the clarification Ian, I look forward to hearing about and writing further on your developments of Ultraband.
[...] Ian Lockwood then gave a quick introduction to the Nottingham Fibre project, as a call to arms for Lace Market tech co’s to unite in the fight for faster broadband. I’ve blogged about this project recently under its previous name, Ultraband. [...]