NGA in the UK: the patchwork quilt

Although Britain was a leader in first-generation broadband, we’re definitely late to the party when it comes to next-generation access (NGA). But the transition to fibre access networks has finally begun, and one image particularly brings this message home to me.

NGA projects are springing up all over the UK, from high-rise apartment blocks in Wembley to Alston, the most sparsely populated parish in the country. The end result is likely to be a “patchwork quilt” of community networks – a term coined by Brian Condon, director of Community Broadband Networks (CBN), and illustrated in this neat image made by Adrian Wooster, CBN’s chief technology officer.

The “patchwork quilt” is the preferred model of three scenarios describing how NGA might evolve in the UK. The alternatives were “Da Wo” (Big Me), which describes a new world based on one dominant network owner, and “islands of connectivity” a fragmented world with sub-scale isolated networks. Important work is under way at the newly formed Independent Networks Co-operative Association (INCA), and through the COTS (Commercial, Technical and Operational Standards) initiative, which aim to make sure that the UK ends up with the patchwork quilt scenario rather than just “islands of connectivity”.

With the enthusiasm of one still relatively fresh to blogging and the world of HTML/CSS, I thought it would be really cool to turn this into a clickable image map, with each area on the map linking to information about the project. Finally, I’ve found a few spare moments to pull it together. You can see the results by clicking on the thumbnail image of the patchwork quilt.

This is a map of community projects in the main, and so does not include BT’s recent fibre deployments, not Virgin Media’s cable network which is capable of delivering broadband at 50 Mbps or more. I still don’t have information for all the projects, so if you see a good web source about any of the projects, please email me or leave a comment, and I’ll add it to the map.

The image is © Adrian Wooster. I am grateful to Adrian for allowing me to use it.

For a written overview of NGA projects in the UK, I recommend this report from the Communications Consumer Panel.