Thanks to Rachel and Adam over at VikingFM

Viking FM has exclusively learned K-Com’s dominance in Hull’s broadband market could end within weeks.

We’ve been told a new company, called Fibrestream, has been given permission to start installing fibre optic cables into the city, providing internet, HDTV and phone services.

These are currently only available through K-Com’s Karoo service.

Once installed, users will have speeds of up to 100MB per second download speed. That compares to Karoo’s 8MB a second service, and Lord Carter’s pledge to offer every home has 2MB speed by 2012.

It could mean it would be possible to download and watch an hour long TV programme in around 1 minute.

Guy Jarvis, the CEO of Fibrestream, explains how the technology works:

“Instead of the copper wires which we’ve been using for the last one-hundred years, next-generation access is putting fibre optics in.

“Basically what that involves is putting a number of tubes into the building, and then you have an individual fibre which is about the size of a human hair, which comes into each of the flats” he said.

Great Thornton Street Estate the first to benefit

But superfast broadband won’t be just for the super rich. In fact, we’ve learned the first people to benefit from this new service live on one of the poorest estates in the city.

Fibrestream are making the service available to people on the Great Thornton Street Estate; at first it will be available to around 400 flats on the estate.

They hope then to introduce it to the Orchard Park estate.

“If you look back at Hull over the course of the 20th century, we were very much at the forefront in terms of telecommunications.”

“Part of what we’re doing is a contribution to putting Hull back on the map, and putting us back at the forefront of telecommunications in the 21st century.”

The injustice of the £6 per line annual broadband tax as proposed in Lord Carter’s Digital Britain Report is that it is applied to copper fixed line rental, a.k.a. dial tone, rather than to broadband itself.

As well as being regressive and a most unwelcome extra burden in the currently depressed UK Economy, this taxation is also wrong headed - put simply, why should people who don’t want broadband subsidise those who do?

By analogy, Carter’s Broadband Tax is like taxing Jews, Moslems and Veggies to subsidise the price of pork (…barrels?)

- a proposition that would certainly draw howls of protest, so why should the matter of broadband be treated any differently?

Whilst universal broadband choice is laudable and something that FibreStream exists to enable, setting out to achieve this outcome by applying taxation to those who do not necessarily want broadband is simply inequitable discrimination

- nothing less than the tyranny of the majority against the minority, often the Elderly and the least well-off members of Society, hardly an exemplar of caring Socialism in action.

If Carter’s Broadband Tax is instead targeted fairly at existing broadband subscribers, both fixed line and mobile, then those who do not wish to take broadband service would not be penalised for having a conventional phone line, in order to subsidise those who do.

An inevitable, perhaps unintended, outcome of this regressive tax will be a marked increase in mobile broadband uptake at the expense of fixed line services which will result in the total revenues from fixed line services dwindling rapidly away.

Say No! to the Broadband Poll Tax

Cloud Computing and particularly the endgame of Elastic Domains is a key driver for business competitiveness particularly in rural areas, as it eliminates the need for businesses to buy and maintain high cost desktop, laptop, telephone and server systems on site.

In order to realise these benefits, this requires a quality, consistent and symmetric, same upload and download, of 1Mbps per staff member.

Elastic Domain Cloud Computing readily generates ongoing cost savings of 30% to 40% which is hugely significant when you consider a conventional 30 users business network has a 3 year Total Cost of Ownership of £150,000 or more.

This is an interview from BBC Radio Scotland, “The Business” with Graham Stewart  - podcast here from 17 Minutes 50 Seconds onwards and archived at the end of this post.

Transcript::

GS: Let me bring in Guy Jarvis, who runs telecommunications solutions specialists FibreStream - Guy you are very much engaged with the Next Generation of Communications Technology, what is it you offer?

GJ: We take an alternative approach to Next Generation Access, the simplest way to describe the Fibrestream difference is we say the First Mile rather than the Last Mile…

This is because where communications networks are concerned, its the people in communities, the businesses, particularly in rural areas, who pay for the services, who make it happen, so they need to be put first in this mix.

This means as much mutual NextGenUs ownership as it does the technology itself.

Our sense of The Carter Report is that it is not a bad report per se, it just a little bit conservative with small c in terms of its aspirations for the country.

GS: Why… 2017 for extra fast broadband, what’s wrong with that?

GJ: We are talking about aspirations, being world leading, let’s take just the two examples of the South Korean and Japanese Universal Service Obligations - 100Mbps upload and download today, their aspirations are for 1000 Mbps in 2012, this is in contrast to Carter’s 2Mbps download-only for 2012 and perhaps 50Mbps for 2017.

GS: Do we really need those speeds though?

GJ: Yes I think we do, if we are looking at the direction that business computing is moving in.

One of the really big growth areas is what’s called Cloud Computing which mean low cost machines in the business, less requirement for scarce and costly support staff on site as everything works remotely.

This is instead of having a lot of expensive equipment on the premises especially in rural areas where also there are often issues with power supplies and reliability.

GS: Final question to Danny  - As regards the economy of Scotland and the Highlands, are we at risk of remaining second class citizens on the global information highway?

Danny Alexander MP - I think there is a real danger of that and it is very interesting to hear what Guy has just been saying about other countries ambitions and I think we should be setting our ambitions for Scotland and the Highlands at the same level too  -the answer though is in our own hands….

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“High density housing is attractive. Networks have to be economically sustainable but there must also be value to people. Without people the network is silent,” said Guy Jarvis, managing director of FibreStream.

FibreStream is planning on rolling out fibre to an estate in Hull. Working with the Goodwin Development Trust, the network could eventually serve 5,000 people.

For residents it offers a cheap way to hook up to High Definition TV.

“The triple play of voice, ultra-fast broadband and TV is attractive to people. To get even free HD content involves having a satellite dish and a set-top box and not everyone can afford it,” said Mr Jarvis.

But there are some very real social benefits too.

Read the full BBC Story here

Great Shout out from BBC and NYNET on Adam Tomlinson’s Breakfast Show this morning.

Thanks Jane and Andy

Audio - 2H 10M to 2H 15M