Put broadband rollout in the hands of the BBC

Tony Ballard, Partner with law firm Harbottle & Lewis LLP has been talking about idea of getting the BBC to roll out the the government's planned 2Mb/s universal broadband service and so bypass the various quangos being set up to do this.  He has spoken on the Broadcast magazine's blog but I suspect unless you have a subscription you won't be able to read it.

Public money, or at least the BBC’s underspend on its provision for digital switchover, is to be made available through Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK), a creature of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, to procure the building of the necessary facilities. Why not put this in the hands of the BBC instead? ..... And since the BBC is going to be obliged to pay for it anyway out of the switchover underspend, why not put it on the BBC instead of a new quango?  The framework is already there – not just in the principle of universality but also in the BBC’s new Charter commitment to help to deliver the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services in promoting its other services..... It would avoid what might be an unfortunate precedent in the Government taking back some part of the licence fee.  It would avoid an unnecessary quango and associated costs.  It would increase the reach of its online services.  And the internet being a truly open platform (since all that it would be financing would be the transport layer of the local access networks), it would enable basic broadband access in the not-spots and fulfil the USC.

 However if you can't get to this, he has said very similar things in Computer Weekly recently too.

I love the comment from the Computer Weekly article from Lindsey Annison...

No, no, no, this will never work. It's joined up thinking for crying out loud and that is just not permissible within BIS, etc. And anyway, the USC doesn't have to be delivered until 2015 as of today (Jeremy Hunt's speech at BDUK event-in-a-small-room), so by the time we get close to that most people who know that they cannot run their businesses or homes on less than 100Mbps will have left the rural areas for a) the cities b) other countries. I spoke at the Digital Media Conference in Oxford a few years ago on a panel about the future use of the digital spectrum post-switchover. I pushed for it to be used for broadband, against the mobile operators, HDTV guys etc, and cited the existence of BBC towers etc to make the job even easier in remote places. What you are saying is an extension of that idea - spectrum + money + BBC and we have **a workable plan.** There's no chance then, is there? ;o)