The U.K.’s telecom regulator is taking the wrong approach to broa...

should be to increase end users’ access to all networks, the Access to Broadband Campaign (ABC) said. The imminent departure of BT Retail chief Pierre Danon -- and the collapse of Britain’s “regional aggregation body” system, which aimed to pool public sector broadband demand for bigger discounts to allow infrastructure to be brought to areas of the country where it’s not now economically feasible for suppliers -- show the pressure being imposed on the market by the way the U.K. operates, ABC CEO Brian Condon told us. Danon may have realized how difficult BT Retail will be to run after Ofcom’s proposal to open up broadband competition by forcing the incumbent either to change its behavior or face a competition investigation (CD Nov 19 p5), he said. ABC wants to see radical changes in the way telecom products are defined, Condon said. The costs of moving data should relate to the costs of providing the service, not the products available. “Middle-mile” transport of data should be handled via packet-switched Internet Protocol (IP) networks, not circuit-switched public switched telephone networks, he said. Proper competition in the middle mile would spur alternate operators to build capacity to capture traffic, allowing them to share proportionally in the transport of data, he said (whatever network is most able to carry traffic at a particular time would do so and derive the revenue from its carriage). ABC is attempting to put together a consortium to bid for R&D funding from the Dept. of Trade & Industry, Condon said. The money would be used for a specific trial of the new model in a small set of local area exchanges, giving industry a chance to see how it works. The govt. should force the creation of such an internal IP network, ABC said. However, it said, “so far there seems to be no recognition of these issues within govt.”