UK may not be on FTTH charts yet, but innovation increasing
Tuesday 09 October 2012 11:32:57 by Andrew Ferguson

The NextGen 12 conference which operates as a platform to allow interested parties to meet and share knowledge and hopefully encourage investment and roll-out of better broadband services across the UK. As part of the conference presentations of several awards took place at the Palace of Westminster.

• Award for Rural Leadership and Community Development - Cambium Networks and allpay Broadband
  For its use of church spires to support wireless broadband roll-outs.
• Award for Innovative Funding Solutions - Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN)
  For its ongoing work in bringing full fibre to parishes in East Lancashire
• Award for Collaborative Advantage - CityFibre
  For its work in York and the creation of a backbone for a city-wide FTTH network.
• Award for Urban Enterprise - Hyperoptic
  For bringing Gigabit broadband to residential and business developments.

The key now for all these award winners is to grow and provide enough connections so that we can start to seriously catch up with some of our European neighbours. The Fibre to the Home Council Europe currently does not list the UK on its FTTH/B charts because we do not have the 1% minimum coverage to appear, fingers crossed the myriad of projects across the UK will in six months time mean we have full fibre available to many more properties.

Conferences such as NextGen 12 can help provide the impetus to encourage community groups and investors to invest both time and money, the last few years has seen the UK waste a lot of time debating and all too often focused on the negative aspects, we need to break that cycle and celebrate the positive if we are to encourage the investors to invest in the UK broadband market. Russia is a great example adding 719,000 new subscribers to FTTH/B networks in just the first half of 2012.