The Office of Communications (Ofcom) chose the end of the year to announce a change that will make 2004 memorable for many rural communities. On December 29, the day it started regulating telecoms and broadcasting, Ofcom stated that frequencies between 5.725GHz and 5.85GHz - known as 5.8GHz B and C - will be opened for rural wireless broadband internet access. "Broadband Britain should be for all of Britain - not just urban communities," said Stephen Carter, chief executive of Ofcom.
Affordable broadband is now available to more than 85% of Britons through ADSL, the technology that piggybacks on telephone lines. But in November, e-commerce minister Stephen Timms said that wireless, or short-range radio, technology is the key to reaching the parts that other broadbands don't reach. BT is already testing this in four locations as a way of extending the range of its telephone exchanges.
Compared with the licences for third-generation (3G) mobile networks, auctioned in April 2000 for £22.5bn, 5.8GHz will be very cheap. Initially, Ofcom will charge £1 a year for each terminal installed, with a minimum of £50 a year for each provider. The licences, the first of which will be granted later this month, will enable data transfer speeds of up to one megabit per second: 18 times the maximum speed of a dial-up modem, and twice as fast as standard ADSL.
Ofcom says that 5.8GHz services have a range of up to 6km (3.7 miles), although local topography often cuts this to a couple of kilometres - but that compares well with the few hundred metres range of Wi-Fi. And 5.8GHz can be extended through a "mesh wireless" network, where users connect through other users. It does require a fixed external aerial, and so does not have Wi-Fi's mobility.
Ofcom says it will award licences with a light touch: forms are available on its website, although they must be sent in by post. Successful applicants will administer their licence online.
Will this help? Austen Stanley, who is campaigning for broadband at the Fladbury exchange in Worcestershire , is not convinced. "If I was in the middle of Scotland or Wales, it would become interesting," he says. But with Fladbury having 173 registrations against a BT trigger level for conversion of 300, he thinks it makes more sense to campaign for registrations than try to set up a wireless scheme, even if licences are cheap. "When BT issued its 2,300 trigger levels [in November, providing them for exchanges connecting 99.1% of the population] it killed the competition dead," he says.
Others are already investigating fixed wireless - and its drawbacks. Residents of Earls Colne in Essex are hoping to share a broadband link with a nearby business park on higher ground. "We can run it off a fairly small aerial, but it needs to have a line of sight," says local campaigner Shaun Thomas. "And how will it cope with volume [of traffic] or with bad weather? It needs to be tested."
Angela Vivian has helped establish a wireless service in Wedmore in Somerset . It opened in June and now charges 31 business customers £21.90 a month for a one megabit service, taking advantage of a government subsidy and equipment donated by Cisco. It uses wireless to share four satellite links among its customers, and will be extended to three nearby villages over the next three months.
"There's much more to doing wireless than removing some bureaucratic layers," says Vivian. "What happens inside the house? Who does the maintenance? What happens if they want more than one link?" She believes such schemes can create community spirit, but require work.
The 5.8GHz frequency band has previously been employed by the military and broadcasters - and both will continue to use it. The government says interference with military users will be prevented by dynamic frequency selection, which avoids using frequencies already in use, and transmission power control, so signals are only as powerful as they need to be, making interference less likely.
However, to prevent interference with outside broadcasts, Ofcom will not award 5.8Ghz licences in 22 areas until problems can be resolved, which may take a year. These exclude anywhere within 20km (12.4 miles) of Westminster and Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands, as well as 20 other 10km-radius exclusion zones. There are exclusion zones around St Andrews and Royal Troon golf courses, and the site of the Glastonbury festival near Pilton in Somerset.
Vivian questions the need for a full-time exclusion zone: "Cameras are in place for one or two weeks of the year - there must be a way around this."
Matt Peacock, head of communications at Ofcom, says it makes more sense to solve this problem permanently than allow services that would need to be suspended for broadcasts.
He adds that last week's announcement is the first of many on broadband, with plans to free spectrum, including licence-holders trading unused bandwidth, rather than returning it to the regulator for reallocation.
