Super-fast broadband is the quickest vehicle, writes Alex Turner – but Liverpool is out of gear

PROFESSOR Dennis Kehoe, chief executive of Aimes Grid Services, is unequivocal in his assessment of Liverpool’s digital infrastructure.

“The north of England is a digital desert and Liverpool is the driest part,” he said.

“There are two issues for our city region – the levels of digital infrastructure and digital exclusion.

“Digital exclusion – lack of uptake to the internet in homes – is the highest of any city in the UK. This creates a downward spiral.

“We have less digital infrastructure so we are not at the front of the queue for pilot schemes and projects.”

BT’s new fibre broadband network will give access to 500,000 homes from 28 exchanges by 2010. Parts of London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff and Belfast, plus a couple of rural pilot areas, will be able to benefit from speeds of 40-60Mbps as part of a £1.5bn investment.

BT plans to roll out its fibre optic network to 10m homes by 2012.

Prof Kehoe is evangelical about the importance of digital infrastructure, believing that Liverpool needs to grab the opportunity in front of it to seize the potential rewards.

“Three hundred years ago, the city’s fathers saw international trade and the Americas,” he said. “They mortgaged the city, for £12,000, and built the first dock. Eighteen months later, they repaid that loan and built another dock.

“This is the 21st-century dock.”

Just as the docks were built to deal with the growth in international trade, the digital infrastructure is required to handle the massive increase in, and reliance on, computing.

He said: “Data is growing in two ways – in volume and in importance. For every single business, it is growing exponentially in both directions.

“It’s estimated that 80% of businesses who have a severe data failure are out of business in 18 months.

“Business needs to be aware of the importance of information and the problems of being digitally excluded.”

He sums it up frankly: “Information is as important to businesses as cash is.” The growing importance of handling data – and a vision of changes to how this is done – is why Prof Kehoe, the former Saxby Professor of e-Business at the University of Liverpool retired from his tenured position to run Aimes in 2006.

He made the move when Aimes was set up as a community interest company, four years after he had established the project.

He said: “We were awarded some research funding and Objective 1 grants in 2002, around an idea that computing was going to move to a utility – software would be provided as a service and infrastructure as a service.

“We saw there would be lots of business opportunities from this model, which is now described as cloud computing. There are lots of economic reasons why that is the most effective way.”

It is not just the commercial sector that is looking at the opportunities – and the threat of falling behind.

Last week, the Government unveiled its Digital Britain report which set out how it will deal with everything from internet provision to computer games.

Pledges to ensure superfast broadband access followed the Government’s commitment that every home can connect up to 2Mbps – two megabits per second – broadband operation by 2012. The report said: “Universal availability of today’s network is a necessary, but not sufficient step in delivering the sort of digital infrastructure we want for the UK.

“We also need to see tomorrow’s network available widely across the country in the coming years.

“While we cannot predict with accuracy the full effects of a new network, we can note the productivity gains from first- generation broadband.

“It is not fanciful to imagine further gains from next generation broadband.”

HOWEVER, the report stopped short of committing the public sector to massive investment in infrastructure, saying that governments needed “to be careful not to chill or displace private investment”.

It said: “We have examined the likelihood of market-led investment throughout the country in this critical national infrastructure.

“We welcome the substantial investment already taking place, and are confident that the UK’s competitive markets will provide the stimulus for further investment without any Government intervention, providing competitive coverage of super-fast, next- generation broadband for between half and two-thirds of the population. In the UK, we will achieve wide-scale next generation coverage first through market-led investment and, to a smaller degree, through targeted intervention.”

Part of that market-led investment is coming from Newton-le-Willows firm i3 Group, which deploys and builds fibre optic networks.

Elfed Thomas, i3 Group chief executive, is clear that internet connectivity will be as fundamental as any other utility to the home. But the Digital Britain report – and its 2Mbps target – left him under-whelmed.

“Though the speed of the network is important, we seem to be once again focusing on the consumer demands of today, rather than what is going to be needed in the future,” he said.

“By the time the consumer is demanding next-generation services, the infrastructure is once again incapable of supporting delivery.

“Other countries are streets ahead of the UK when it comes to next- generation service access, delivering super-fast broadband, remote health services and other interactive and content services that can be tailored to individual needs.

“However, we want to change this in the UK and are building Fibrecities in Bournemouth and Dundee with plans to roll out to a further 1m homes across the UK over the next 10 years.”

Adrian Crook is a director of i3’s Fibrecity division, which is responsible for developing this infrastructure.

This is in the form of fibre optic cables which are laid in cost-effective ways by, for example, placing them in sewers and water pipes.

“Fibre is as cheap as noodles, sticking it in the road isn’t. Digging it up is very expensive and it’s very difficult to close roads,” said Mr Crook.

“In Bournemouth and Dundee, we are trying to create that utility model. We are offering everyone a free connection to their home.

“It’s like when people moved from bottle gas to mains gas – it has to be done in that utility model, otherwise it doesn’t work from a delivery perspective.”

Back at Aimes, Prof Kehoe is in a hurry to drag people from the digital desert and onto the fast line of the information superhighway.

“We do need to be talking up digital Liverpool because what it will do to other businesses in Liverpool,” he said. “We are not becoming a knowledge economy – we are a knowledge economy.

“But we have all got to get smarter.”

alex.turner