Climbing Out of the Silos

Whilst the government agency BDUK is in the process of deploying £530m to support broadband services in the ‘final third’ another part of government, the Department for Energy & Climate Change (DECC), is planning to spend around £11.3bn on a smart metering system for all homes and businesses, of which £1.5bn will be spent on the communications element.

At the Parliament and the Internet conference on 13th October the Information Society Alliance (EURIM) ran a workshop to discuss joining up the broadband and smart metering/smart grid energy agendas. It was a timely and useful debate. Whilst the government agency BDUK is in the process of deploying £530m to support broadband services in the ‘final third’ another part of government, the Department for Energy & Climate Change (DECC), is planning to spend around £11.3bn on a smart metering system for all homes and businesses, of which £1.5bn will be spent on the communications element. So far it seems that government has been unable to join up these two agendas.

Even at the level of sharing existing infrastructure (ducts, masts and poles) linking the broadband and energy agendas seems to be difficult in this country. Efforts by civil servants to bring the utility companies into this debate appear to have borne little fruit so far.
 
It doesn’t have to be like this. In other countries energy and telecoms can work together successfully. In rural Denmark local energy distribution co-ops have been rolling out fibre to the home since 2007. These organisations are used to building infrastructure with a payback period of 20+ years and understand that as well as providing new next generation broadband services they can evolve their smart grid & smart metering programmes in tandem. By 2012 they aim to have all homes and businesses in their region of Jutland connected to fibre.

Similarly in the United States the rural energy and telecommunications co-ops are working together on a common agenda. Set up from the 1940s onwards to serve rural Americans, the utility co-ops have created organisations like the National Rural Telecommunications Co-operative to strengthen their broadband and energy services through ‘integrated smart grid technologies and energy efficiency solutions, wireless technologies, long distance programs, mobile phone service, IP backbone services, and programming distribution rights for video providers’.

Neither of these examples is the same as linking two sets of government priorities but they demonstrate that on the ground, co-operative approaches involving both sectors can work. At a time of big ambitions for broadband and energy efficiency, but straitened circumstances, maybe it is about time that the ministers involved got together to encourage the different players to climb out of their silos and develop a co-ordinated agenda.


Malcolm Corbett
CEO, Independent Networks Co-operative Association
18th October 2011

 [Picture source: Bystrup’s T-Pylon design]