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"Don't leave rural broadband to the market" - Minister

Welsh Minister Andrew Davies agrees that "stealth" marketing will bring rural broadband to remote areas - but also believes that Government has to "make up for market value" in some areas. And he uses wireless 802.11b for the job amongst other technologies

When you get five people all saying the same thing a week after a high-profile seminar on the subject, I think it's reasonable to suspect they've all been to the seminar, don't you? And the "Broadband Stakeholder" conference a couple of weeks back seems to have been the source of several people, all looking at rural broadband, suggesting the same stealth marketing technique.

The latest - Andrew Davies, Minister for Economic Development and eMinister, Welsh Assembly Government - admits he was at the conference. His theme was that Wales needed to be ahead of England in rolling out broadband - first, because it started late, second because it has some pretty rugged rural areas where normal cable-laying can't be done easily, third because they need to attract business to the area, and mostly, because it's a politically advantageous thing for a politician to do, of course.

But his theme was hauntingly similar to the explanation that Richard Nuttall gave for Invisible Networks and its method of rolling out 802.11b networks into village areas in England (so far) as a way of persuading the more established data providers that there really is demand for it. "It's easier to get them interested in upgrading a service which has run out of bandwidth, than to install something on spec," was the way Nuttall put it.

Davies told me that his project is, in many ways, easier than it would be in England. "I mean by this, that the scale of Government in Wales is different," said the Minister. "The whole area of getting different people working together, cross-cutting, is so much easier; Whitehall is a huge machine." And he added: "There has to be political leadership. It's an act of faith that broadband and ICT will be vital in transforming Welsh economy; we have to take a lead, we have to do this."

Interestingly, his department has been funding wireless experiments too. He was introduced to legendary American hacker Colonel Dave Hughes, who has been preaching spread spectrum wireless as a way of bringing phone and Internet to remote areas for years, and Hughes came over to Wales and set up two pioneer wireless networks. One is called Arwain, which covers much of Cardiff with 802.11b wireless. The other is E-fro, in an old slate valley. Both are subsidised.

Most of the money to be spent - millions - will go on putting education, and NHS broadband in. Davies claims that already he has more GPs with broadband (percentage) than in England, and that his schools - although not included in Tony Blair's planned billion-pound educational project - are already ahead of England. Subsidy is the way to go.

That interested me: if "stealth" marketing is the way to go, why subsidise? Why not just leaving to market forces?

"I've taken the view that we are making up for market value. Wales has 5% of the UK population, and provides only 1% of BT's total UK market. If we left it to the market, much of Wales would not get the benefits of broadband; if we left it to the carriers, (no criticism of them) Welsh communities would be further disadvantaged. The role of Government is to make up for that."