Ofcom Chief Talks Broadband at Total Telecom World

Total Telecom World, a two day get-together of carriers and telecoms firms from around the world, played host to discussions about the superfast broadband market. The event also heard the speech of the Chief Executive of Ofcom, Ed Richards.

The talk of bandwidth utilization and creation of superfast broadband, and whether the market would be spacious to accommodate the demands, were high in the air during the conference.

That’s because the presence of a cloud of uncertainty makes it difficult for Ofcom to lend a backing hand.

Ed Richard’s speech delved into the challenge of risk and uncertainty:

“However, for superfast broadband, subscriber numbers are still low, perhaps because the nearest thing we have found to a ‘killer app’ so far is the demands of the multi-user household. Amid a cornucopia of entertainment and information services, and the promise of advanced telemetry, e-health and interactive education, it is interesting that the only ‘killer app’ we have so far is the presence of teenage children.

Social networking, streaming and sharing from the teenage bedroom, leading to local contention, the victim of which is the person typically paying the bill, seems to be among the strongest reasons for adopting superfast broadband. But as an approach to promoting superfast broadband take up, ‘having more teenage children’ seems a little long term, and a little distant from reality.”

You can see the truth in those words, for the user’s needs to be met, there should be a capable network to web in multiple devices, as needed. Talking about social networking sites, both Facebook and Twitter come under low bandwidth.

High definition gaming is also on track with online streamed games becoming more and more popular. A connection of 7Mbps can get the full colors of the game. But bring that down to consoles and PC games, and 0.1Mbps is all that is needed, plus both pack the requirements for an almost zero jitter and latency.

Ed Richard also points out that two-third of the United Kingdom will be facing competition between superfast networks of Virgin Media and Openreach.

VULA or Virtual Unbundled Local Access will be sought as the best option by Ofcom in order to fulfill its targets filed deep into the network areas of the UK.

BT is already present in such areas with rolls of their superfast network being laid on a commercial basis. Ofcom walks a tightrope above price, quality of service, speed and availability.

The low price-wise policy that UK maintains has helped the country with high level of take-up.

As a generation of teenagers grows into bill payers, hopefully, they will find value in the extra cost for good broadband access and thus pay for superfast packages. But when taken as a whole, there are a lot more people other than teenagers who spend their life in front of computers.

As we move forward in this digital era, the integration of TV/Internet/Mobile into one whole ball does bring the work of Ofcom on to an easier level. The bigger problem faced now is the lack of people having the know-how of technical issues involved.

Image courtesy of Flickr user kainet