In its latest opinion article (http://opinion.enta.net) Entanet says that whilst the government’s increasing investment into providing superfast broadband is welcome, it won’t be the silver bullet for the UK economic recovery that many analysts predict.
Entanet’s Head of Service Operations, Neil Watson says: “We don’t believe that superfast broadband will single-handedly bring us out of the economic downturn but we do welcome the investments being made. We also believe something needs to be done about the cost of wholesale bandwidth. Otherwise smaller market players are going to struggle to keep up with capacity demands. This will lead to a lack of viable competition within the market, restricting consumer choice and potentially leading to monopolistic behaviour.”
Watson argues that by focusing on the increasing speeds of broadband the demands on provider’s networks and bandwidth capacity is becoming too great, and without action to bring down the cost of wholesale broadband smaller ISPs will be unable to support the fastest products (e.g. FTTC and FTTP).
He continues: “Whilst the Government and BT plough money into faster and faster broadband, there is also the key issue of the cost of wholesale bandwidth. We believe BT Wholesale need to consider this impact and reduce their wholesale bandwidth charges to enable smaller ISPs to be able to support the emerging services, this may require intervention from Ofcom.”