In combination with an upcoming election where super-fast broadband and its funding is expected to become a political football, this is described as potentially being "another crossroads" for the Digital Britain initiative. Point Topic comments that core to the reach and uptake of NGA services will be the return which suppliers can make on their investment, and the tariffs which end-users are charged
“Products for NGA are too important to be left to the network operators,” said Annelise Berendt, NGA analyst at Point Topic. “There are too many challenges to leave it to lots of individual players, each doing their own thing. On the other hand, if we left the whole product set to be defined by BT that would really limit competition.”
The report goes on to say that several issues need to be resolved to strike a balance, including: how to encourage competition in next-generation broadband provision, while maintaining the financial and economic viability of investment in infrastructure; the balance to be made between active and passive wholesale products, given the "more limited scope" for innovation that active products entail; and how the industry can ensure that the growing variety of infrastructure providers does not translate into a patchwork of disparate products and interfaces, making mass-market deployment difficult to achieve.
“How the market is regulated is extremely important. Evidence shows that too much dependence on infrastructure competition, essentially wires to premises, leads to slow growth as in the UK in the 90s and the US today,” adds Ms. Berendt. “On the other hand, too much focus on service competition stifles investment in new networks. It’s a balancing act and we can’t rely on commercial organisations to follow policies which will maximise the benefits to society as a whole.”
Point Topic states that the glue to pull all of these potential products together and ease their implementation is standardisation - a standardised and coordinated approach is described as being "paramount" for the financial viability of NGA networks. “Ofcom in particular faces a significant challenge,” concludes Ms. Berendt. “It has to help new entrants to climb the investment ladder without compromising choice, without stifling competition, and without mortgaging the future of the UK’s newest utility."
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